Is Multicore from Mars and MPSoC from Venus?
I’m attending ESWeek in Atlanta this week and on Sunday I participated in the workshop on Compiler Assisted SoC Assembly (CASA 08), well organised by Joerg Henkel of the University of Karlsruhe. There were many interesting presentations and discussions during the workshop and a good panel discussion in which I participated. One of the impressions I got from the workshop was a set of contradictions and contrasts that reminded me of the Mars-Venus dichotomy:
Mars and Venus: Source Nasa/JPL
Specifically, there seems to be a set of strong gaps between:
Embedded Systems vs. the High-Performance Computing orthodoxy
Multicore Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) systems vs. the MPSoC Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) systems
Plugged in products vs. Plugless (battery-powered) products
Prevailing design philosophies in Europe and Asia vs. the prevailing design philosophy in the U.S.
Specifically - is Multicore from Mars (emphasising big iron computational issues) and MPSoC from Venus (emphasising communications)?
(Edited 13:45 EDT Tuesday 21 October 2008): This impression of the dichotomy was reinforced when Peter Marwedel gave a talk and mentioned the 1st ARTIST Workshop on Mapping of Applications to MPSoCs, held June 16-17, 2008 at Schloss Reinfels in Germany (slides available at the link). I noticed that none of the presenters listed at this workshop represented the big SMP Multicore processor domain (e.g. IBM, Intel, SUN, etc.) but were very much from the AMP MPSoC camp (with the exception from ARM MPCore, but arguably this is not intended for large compute servers anyway). (end of edit).
Of course none of these are hard and fast divisions, but there are differences in product design requirements and approaches that lead to different architectures and different choices in processors and programming models. I’m not sure that I have a good map of the variations, although attending such workshops and talking to designers and researchers from different communities helps build up a map of the world. I am very interested in the future evolution of design methodologies and wonder if simple taxonomies help us characterise the approaches.
As always, your comments are very welcome! Do you work on either side of these divides, and if so, do you see different design approaches?
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November 9th, 2008 @ 3:30 pm
I agree that the classic HPC people tend to have a different world-view compared to the classic embedded people. For HPC, symmetric MP is all there is, while for an embedded head, ASMP is far more common.
What is the US design philosophy? Apart from the simple fact that most general-purpose gorillas are US in origin?
November 9th, 2008 @ 9:00 pm
It’s interesting; many in the US look primarily to what Intel, IBM, AMD and Sun are doing to define their view of “Multicore” and “Manycore”, and tend to think of big iron servers and big HPC as the start and finish of the multicore design style and debate. This is quite ironic, as for example TI, and Motorola (while they still had Motorola Semiconductor, now Freescale) are of course US-headquartered companies, and were pioneers in embedded Multicore chips (as in MPSoC, with control processors, DSPs and accelerators) that were and are ASMP oriented. However, one think I noted was that teams in both TI and Motorola Semi working on communications chips were often either located in Europe, or worked closely with teams in Europe, or had members who had come from Europe. And many of us know that much of TI’s OMAP series of MPSoC designs for wireless devices were designed in Europe at TI’s Villeneuve-Loubet location (with no doubt designers drawn from many places). So arguably those parts of the US companies that took a more MPSoC, ASMP bent, were heavily Euro-centric or Euro-influenced.
These days there are lots of smaller companies with design teams across the globe including in the US doing MPSoC. But the US electronics press (or what is left of it) still looks more at what the big companies do and don’t dig in enough across the spectrum.