October 30, 2008 -- Today, some SOC architects view the multicore movement as irrelevant to the embedded, often hard-real-time world of SOCs. But others predict that as we move from 90nm to 65 and 45nm and beyond, SOCs will follow server and PC-processor chips into the multicore world. Instead of today’s typical architecture, in which a single CPU core sits at the center of a complex fabric of buses and controls a heterogeneous collection of specialized engines and peripherals, a multicore SOC might look more like a sea of nearly identical CPU cores. Perhaps there would be a few application-specific processor cores, as well, and certainly, there would be a huge portion of on-chip memory — some local to the processor cores and some shared. But in contrast with today’s SOCs, there likely would not be a single controlling processor. Rather, the system would distribute control among the cores, and this distributed kernel would dynamically map tasks onto cores, according to current needs and power constraints.

It sounds radical. But examples now exist of SOCs moving in this direction. If the vision comes to pass, it will change much of today’s conventional wisdom about SOCs and how they work.

By Ron Wilson, EDN Executive Editor