I recently saw a holiday gift advertisement highlighting the many choices of GPS navigational devices available, and noted how the market has clearly moved from an early adopter toy to mainstream use. And, wow, how it has changed the way people manage their ground transportation trips. Not only do we no longer need to call ahead to friend, family or business contacts asking for directions to their location, now with our favorite GPS “nav” device we don’t even need to print out internet based map directions. No more frantic stops at a gas station hoping to get directions when lost, no more calling ahead to the destination when late, crying help!
Well my reflection upon the benefits of consumer navigation devices reminded me of why we named a very important feature of TI’s KeyStone multicore architecture, the Multicore Navigator; because it simply does that. It minimizes the planning time and optimizes performance of very complex yet powerful programmable SoCs. For the software architects who are implementing applications on the KeyStone devices, the Multicore Navigator provides for optimal software functional allocation across all of the processing elements of the device, saving a tremendous amount of upfront work for the architects. With its “fire and forget” and “zero-copy” run time features, the Multicore Navigator minimizes control overhead and processing latency, and optimizes the processing efficiency.
The bottom line is that with the Multicore Navigator on KeyStone multicore SoCs, products can be implemented and brought to the market significantly faster than with the use of traditional programming models, and possibly more importantly enables software reuse on future, upgraded versions of the products and enables the creation of product variations on the same hardware/software base, in record time. In retrospect I believe the Multicore Navigator promises to have far more positive impact on the multicore programming experience for software programmers than the personal GPS Navigation product has had on the consumer. Sound appealing to some of you software architects?