Industry Articles

April 2008

Pyro AV® Debuts Pyro Kompressor HD™ at NAB: Super-Charged, High-Quality HD Video Compression for Adobe and Blu-ray
NAB SHOW DAILY at the 2008 NABShow

March 2008

Multimode sensor processing using Massively Parallel Processor Arrays (MPPAs)
Programmable Logic DesignLine, Paul Chen and Mike Butts

January 2007

Jeff Bier's Impulse Response – Hanging by Threads

"Multithreaded programming isn't a new idea, but it's currently experiencing a major upswing in attention. That's because many multi-core chip vendors are currently pushing multithreading as the best way to harness their chips' processing horsepower.

But a recent influential paper by Dr. Edward Lee argues that multi-threaded application programming, as commonly practiced, is a flawed methodology that invites a range of nasty, hard-to-identify bugs."

— Inside DSP, Jeff Bier, 1/17/2007

July 2006

Dataquest to EDA: 'It's the software, stupid'

"The next big hurdle is programmability," Nadamuni said. "It's the ability to program these multi-core platforms." She noted that parallel programming is well understood for supercomputer applications, but not for data-intensive embedded applications. Much more difficult, she said, is programming asynchronous, heterogeneous systems."
— EE Times, Gartner Dataquest's Daya Nadamuni, research vice president

Moore's Law Threatened by Multi-Core Programmability Challenge

"We have to figure out how to design software concurrently to use in a multi-core environment. The horror stories of some platform-based designs, the problems with the Cell processor, all point to one thing: we've got to solve the concurrency problem."
— Reed Electronics News, Gary Smith, Gartner Dataquest Managing VP of design and engineering research

March 2006

Market Prospects for Reconfigurable Computers in DSP

— Multicore Expo Presentation, Will Strauss, President Forward Concepts

Multi-core design strives for balance (registration required)

"Multi-core devices may challenge some of the design community's fundamental assumptions about programming. Because multi-core communication is cheaper than memory access, said MIT's Agarwal, designers must migrate from memory-oriented computation models to communication-centric models. Traditional cluster-computing programming methods squander the multi-core opportunity, he said, because message-passing and shared-memory techniques were designed assuming high-overhead communications. Agarwal advocates a 'stream' programming approach that makes minimal use of memory. Values are read from the network, computed and sent out. This avoids memory-access instructions and synchronization."
— EE Times, Professor Anant Agarwal, MIT EECS department

January 2006

The Problem with Threads

"It is widely acknowledged that concurrent programming is difficult. Yet the imperative for concurrent programming is becoming more urgent. Many technologists predict that the end of Moore’s Law will be answered with increasingly parallel computer architectures (multicore or chip multiprocessors, CMPs). If we hope to continue to get performance gains in computing, programs must be able to exploit this parallelism.”
— IEEE Computer magazine, Professor Edward A. Lee, Chair of EE, Associate Chair of EECS EECS Department, University of California at Berkeley