Monsters, incapacitated [Electronics Design]

The paper discusses the multicore processors. The paper states that multicore processors provide unprecedented compute density, but have wound up being the parts used to scare designers about the future. The arrival of multicore processing in computing and embedded systems has often recalled the marketing for a movie. Indeed, what makes the analogy quite apt is that it may be promised the terrors of the Earth, but reality turns out to be an inoffensive stuntman in a cheaply assembled rubber suit. Consider the two most frequent issues. First, there are those instances where a company wants to consolidate four separate processes that may have each occupied their own printed circuit boards within a system. It wants to bring all these functions onto one piece of silicon for reasons such as power efficiency, size and cost. The second case is that the goals are performance rather than technology driven. Most applications have been coded sequentially, that is they have been written to be executed in a single thread on a single processor or core. In a multicore world, the greatest performance stands to be gained by having a program execute simultaneously across as many cores as are available; the program should be written to be executed in multiple threads in parallel.