New group focuses on multicore standards

A new industry group aims to provide a neutral forum where vendors in the multiple-core processor space can work out standards for interprocessor communications, debug and other technology hurdles.

A new industry group that aims to provide a neutral forum where vendors in the multiple-core processor space can work out standards for interprocessor communications, debug and other common technology hurdles in multicore implementations will be discussing its official formation during a meeting in Santa Clara, California, on 30th November 2005.

Being organised as the Multicore Association, the new group is an outgrowth of meetings among chip vendors, semiconductor IP providers, as well as RTOS, compiler and development-tool vendors that have been ongoing since May.

Its focus will be on nonproprietary implementations where products from multiple vendors must work together.

The group has set its initial focus on multitasking and communications application program interfaces (APIs) and debug, with the goal of eventually providing a forum in which all relevant embedded multicore standardisation issues can be discussed and resolved.

"The Multicore Association provides a place for the device industry players to come together and find standard ways of interoperating in the multicore arena", said Tomas Evensen, CTO at Wind River.

"This is a win for both the vendors and the customers, as everybody can focus on adding value on top of the standards instead of reinventing the wheel".

Leading the effort is Markus Levy, a well-known processor analyst who also founded and is President of EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium.

"Ultimately, our goal is to help our participants' customers achieve quicker time to market, and part of this is giving our adopters the ability to certify to their customers that their products are compatible with standards set by the Multicore Association", Levy said.

"As multicore becomes more prevalent and more vendors are working together to create solutions, the need for industry-standard approaches to interfaces, tools, and other challenging technical issues is becoming more urgent and will become increasingly relevant as multicore implementations find their way into a larger set of applications".

Levy defines the scope of the Multicore Association's domain as implementations that use two or more processing elements.

These include, but are not limited to, heterogeneous and homogeneous multiprocessor systems, coprocessors, and hardware accelerators.

On the agenda for 30th November will be discussions in three workgroups that have already formed around the issues of the multitasking and communication API, the debug API, and the Transparent Inter Process Communication (TIPC) protocol.

Further details on the agenda and objectives of each of the workgroups are available on the Multicore Association website.

The meeting will take place from 0900 to 1700 local time in Santa Clara.

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