As the saying goes, my how time flies! In to another new year already. Well before we get used to writing 2012 as the date, I thought I would take a moment to reflect and review some exciting times for multicore development on our initial phase of the Multicore Mix blog. It seems we have had quite a few accomplishments during that short time.
1) I will start with the launch of the Multicore Mix blog itself! The blog had its first post in April of 2011, with six initial bloggers, covering a range of multicore aspects from news, to hardware and software architecture and design guidelines. We are off to a great start, with bigger plans for the future!
2) The 2011 FemtoForum innovative technology award went to the TCI6612/14 multicore SoC family for wireless base station small cell applications. This newly announced (June 2011) heterogeneous (DSP and ARM) multicore SoC received positive response from media and analysts, culminating in a formal presentation at the small cells wireless event of the year! And, the best testimony of the device’s success: subsequent design-ins with various customers.
3) KeyStone Multicore SoC architecture features multicore entitlement. Conquering the integration of such complexity of our KeyStone devices in semiconductor technology is a challenge in itself. Implementing an architecture that enables the software developers to be able to leverage 100% efficiency of such, is a feat.
4) KeyStone Tool Suite keeps ahead of the development cycle with single platform support for ARM and DSP! What good is all of this exciting technology without the tools for the software and hardware developers to successfully implement with? TI’s popular Code Composer Studio (CCS) was enhanced to provide a SINGLE platform for all ARM, DSP and SoC accelerator element programming, integration and test.
5) The launch of the C66x DSP reached its first anniversary. Probably more telling than the positive launch feedback itself, this fixed and floating point, high performance DSP has made its way into many new multicore-based designs. These include traditional sweet spots such as wireless base stations, multimedia gateways,high performance computing, mission critical, medical imaging and industrial automation, as well as new applications that can easily take advantage of the fixed and floating point features and new instructions.
So, while we are pleased with our Multicore Mix Blog progress, we plan to continue to expand and grow, including some guest bloggers in the near future, so stay tuned. And, of course this blog is to benefit you, the readers, the users of multicore technology so what better way for us to serve you than for you to participate! Feel free to comment, respond, suggest new multicore topics. Happy New 2012 Year!