Making Full use of Emerging ARM-based Heterogeneous Multicore SoCs

International audienceThe complexity and pace of heterogeneous SoC architectures is accelerating at blinding speed. While these complex hardware architectures enable product vision, they also create new and difficult challenges for the system architect. Running and debugging an Operating System and application code on a single core is child's play. This is also true for running Synchronous Multiprocessing (SMP) capable Operating Systems on homogenous multicore processors. The modern day SoC combines asymmetric multiple cores, graphics processing units, offload engines and more on a single piece of silicon. This paper will discuss opportunities for system partitioning and consolidation, and some of the key issues and challenges of architecting, developing and debugging software on these complex systems