Association names executive board

The Multicore Association has revealed the make-up of its founding executive board and initial working group members.

The Multicore Association, a new industry group for companies involved with multicore processor, software and system implementations, has revealed the make-up of its founding executive board and initial working group members.

The association also began welcoming applications for membership from chip vendors and semiconductor IP providers, as well as RTOS, compiler and development tool vendors.

Charter members of the Multicore Association executive board include Accelerated Technology, Freescale, Tilera and Wind River.

The initial board also includes Ignios and Polycore as elected members who are heading up association workgroups.

Several additional executive board members and working group members, including ARC, Express Logic and STMicroelectronics, are presently completing the application process.

"Our customers are increasingly demanding higher levels of integration onto single chips", said Jim Holt, Manager of Advanced Core Architecture Enablement at Freescale Semiconductor and one of the participants in the Association's workgroup devoted to creating a standardised API for the management, scheduling, and synchronisation of work entities among or within processor cores.

"These systems-on-chip incorporate multiple processors, including general-purpose CPUs, DSPs, and micro-programmable hardware accelerators".

"Developing software for such systems is nontrivial, so naturally our customers want to leverage their software investments across existing product families and into future systems".

"Multicore standards will help provide that leverage, and can enable semiconductor companies to define product roadmaps with the confidence that customer software investments are secure".

Results of work carried out to date under the auspices of the Multicore Association will be the topic of several papers being delivered at the Multicore Expo, a conference and tradeshow taking place from 21st to 23rd March 2006 at the Santa Clara Convention Centre.

Presenting on the work of the Association's Message Passing and Resource Management Working Group will be Sven Brehmer of Polycore and Mark Lippett of Ignios.

Brehmer will speak on the topic of "Simplifying multicore programming using an industry-standard communication API", and Lippett will present "The resource management API: what is it and what can it do for me?".

Richard Schooler of Tilera will address debug issues in "Standardising on debugging APIs for multicore implementations".

Maarten Koning of Wind River will also speak, as well as chair a track with several sessions on the Transparent Inter Process Communication (TIPC) protocol.

"The number of cores on the typical SoC is set to grow exponentially, and will likely double with each process generation", said Markus Levy, President of the Multicore Association.

"The chips of the future will combine ever-more heterogeneous cores, interconnects, hardware accelerators, and memory hierarchies".

"The potentials of parallel processing on such SoCs are tremendous, but so are the challenges of harnessing this processing capability in a way that supports interoperability and thus helps speed time to market".

"Addressing these challenges is The Multicore Association's mission".

The next working group meetings of the Multicore Association will take place in conjunction with the Multicore Expo.

Interested parties may check out details at the Multicore Association website.

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