News Articles

April 29th, 2010

CriticalBlue Joins eNsemble™
Multi-Core Alliance

To Enable Efficient Migration to and Utilization of Multicore Processors Read full article

April 27th, 2010

CriticalBlue and Freescale collaborate to streamline and simplify multicore software development

CriticalBlue’s Prism development environment now available for industry-leading Freescale QorIQ multicore processors Read full article

March 31st, 2010

CriticalBlue and MIPS Technologies Enable Software Developers to Quantify Benefits of Migrating to MIPS32®-Based Multicore Platforms

New Prism capabilities support MIPS® architectural detail to accelerate users’ ability to select, use and deploy most appropriate multicore/multithreaded platform Read full article

December 2009

CriticalBlue and MontaVista Partner to Expand Multicore Software Development Solutions for Embedded Linux

Support for Prism on MontaVista Linux will drive faster adoption of multicore platforms and deployment of end products on leading commercial Linux platform Read full article

October 2009

CriticalBlue Adds Support for Hardware Development Boards to Prism

Prism’s Market Builds Traction Through Analysis, Exploration, and Verification of Embedded Software under Linux to Ease Migration Path to Multicore Platforms Read full article

March 2009

Multicore programming: easy or difficult?

The advent of homogeneous, shared memory multicore platforms is seen as both a threat and an opportunity for the software industry. Many commentators are concerned that efficiently and correctly porting existing code onto platforms with four or more cores is beyond the capabilities of many engineers. Others simply state that this is a solved problem and that mature SMP operating systems and threading libraries already exist and are well understood. So who is right? The answer, of course, is "it depends." Read full article

October 2008

Voices: CriticalBlue’s David Stewart

You’ve basically got two interference patterns here: people trying to move toward more-programmable silicon platforms, but, on the other hand, they are also trying to deal with power consumption and how to continue to increase the performance of the platforms they are building but keep the power consumption under control. It seems like the only answer to that is to use more processors, so you’ve got more processors, but you’ve still got software problems. How do you program these things? It’s not easy. Read full article

September 2008

Toshiba, CriticalBlue collaborate on multicore development environment

CriticalBlue has partnered with Toshiba Corp. to customize elements of CriticalBlue's multicore technology for use by developers targeting Toshiba's multicore Venezia platform. Read full article

Parallel programming for realists

Sharing industry-driven best practices in parallel programming is the only way to unlock the benefits of efficient use of multicore silicon platforms. David Stewart calls on multicore developers to join the Multicore Association's Programming Practices (MPP) working group to benefit the entire industry. Read full article

Transforming Sequential Algorithms to Run Efficiently on Parallel MPCore Systems

MPCore technology provides a coherent shared memory multiprocessing platform with highly scalable performance and low power suitable for embedded consumer applications. Existing multimedia algorithms, developed presuming a sequential programming model, must be parallelized to capture the benefits of a multicore system. Most multimedia algorithms are processing intensive with either static or data dependent workloads. Several examples are shown to illustrate issues commonly encountered when converting sequential algorithms into data parallel implementations. Read full article

July 2008

Getting started with multicore programming

What makes parallelizing C-code so hard? Compared to single core systems, coherent shared memory systems are much more challenging to program correctly. Nevertheless, with an incremental development and test approach to parallelism and a willingness to apply lessons learned by previous parallel programmers, successful systems are being deployed today using existing C/C++ environments. Read full article

June 2008

Attack the parallel worlds of parallel programming

It's the tool industry's obligation to address the issues associated with parallel programming. This observation led David Stewart to propose the setting up of a Multicore Programming Practices (MPP) Working Group under the auspices of the Multicore Association and, when the Association approved the proposal, he agreed to co-chair the group with Max Domeika from Intel. The idea behind this group is to provide hardworking engineers with some practical guidelines based on the current practices in use by other engineers who have learnt how to write parallel software the hard way. Read full article

May 2008

Designers Draft Multicore Programming Guide

CriticalBlue has partnered with Toshiba Corp. to customize elements of CriticalBlue's multicore technology for use by developers targeting Toshiba's multicore Venezia platform. Read full article

'Best practices' emerge for multicore programming

Aiming to define a set of "best practices" for C/C++ programming for multicore platforms, the Multicore Association has established a Multicore Programming Practices (MPP) working group. It will produce guidelines and definitions to help ease the challenge of moving to parallel programming. Read full article

Association takes aim at difficulty of multicore programming

The Multicore Association today announced the formation of a working group focused on easing the challenges software developers face when using C/C++ to program for multicore platforms. The Multicore Programming Practices (MPP) group will initially work to develop a guide that captures current industry best practices with an eye toward helping developers avoid common pitfalls. Read full article

Software Rules The Day In Multicore SoC Design

With the number of on-chip processors set to explode, software-development issues loom for design teams. Yet D&V methodologies may evolve to avert any stumbling over parallelism. Read full article

Programming Multicore Platforms: What’s Really Going On?

The reusable hardware platform, bristling with a range of processor architectures, is becoming commonplace. But even as processor vendors tout their latest multicore offerings, the effective programming of these complex devices remains an open question. Read full article