Intel® Multi-Core Technology do to Enhance Embedded

What Can Intel® Multi-Core Technology do to Enhance Embedded and Communications Applications?

Let’s start with the obvious one: faster performance through parallel processing. But there’s more to it. Intel® multi-core technology also enables platform consolidation, including the ability to combine a multi-platform solution—such as a GUI and RTOS—onto a single piece of hardware. It can also extend the life of legacy applications, enabling old software to run side-by-side with new code on faster platforms. It can increase system utilization, increase performance while reducing energy consumption, and allow systems to share I/O resources—all through virtualization. And by enabling isolation of critical applications and tasks, Intel multi-core technology improves the security of your solutions. In fact, the implementation models for Intel multi-core technology are quite varied and include:

1. Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP): Operating system (OS) manages memory, resources, and controls task/thread assignments. More threaded code in equals more performance out.
2. Virtualization: VMM/hypervisor manages system resources. Supports legacy software and multiple OSs, as well as platform consolidation and the ability toconverge a general purpose GUI with a real-time OS.
3. Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP): Manually assign resources at boot-up. Supports legacy software and multiple OSs and delivers more performance to applications as needed.

Intel multi-core technology is available in a complete array of industry-leading multi-core processors as well as single core processors equipped with hyper-threading technology. These processors deliver unprecedented platform performance and performance-per-watt—a critical requirement for next-generation communications and embedded solutions. Because each execution core in an Intel multi-core processor is clocked slower than a single-core processor, you get lower input voltage and greater performance without increasing the system footprint. And with support from Intel’s award-winning software development tools, you can optimize the software and hardware in your multi-core technology designs for maximum performance and efficiency.

Other benefits of Intel multi-core technology include:

• Backwards compatibility with Intel® architecture-based processors so you can continue to utilize the 32-bit applications of today while adopting 64-bit applications for the future. Virtualized hardware platforms can take advantage of this backwards approach for an even longer period, a benefit to very long-life market segments such as military/aerospace/government.
• Assign different tasks to each execution core, with each one functioning as a distinct processor, allowing you to dedicate multiple applications and OSs to a single execution core, unencumbered by tasks that would otherwise compete for CPU resources. You can even use virtualization to apply heterogeneous parallelism so that some cores function with greater capacity than others.