Industry Expert Blogs
Low power multicore from a software designer's perspective-January 28, 2014 |
After talking about low power CPU modes last week, I make no apology for returning to the topic. Reducing power on a single core embedded system is a challenge. With a multicore design, there are many other nuances. As with most system development, there are two highly interrelated facets to the process: design and verification [which software developers commonly call debugging].
Different semiconductor vendors have different ideas on how to build such systems …
Some months ago, I posted about ARM’s big.LITTLE approach. Broadly, the idea is that the CPUs in a multicore systems are instantiated in pairs. Each CPU of the pair is a different architecture – though both ARM, obviously – one has high computational power and the other is designed to be more power efficient. Code is run on the appropriate CPU according to the power budget of the moment.