Preface
Today’s many applications, such as medical, high-end imaging, high-performance computing
and core networking, are facing increasing challenges in terms of data traffic, processing power
and device- to-device communication . These put a high demand on the processor(s) and asso-
ciated software and lead to processor manufacturers sustaining Moore’s law by introducing
multicore processors. Texas Instruments, with its leading-edge technology, introduced the mul-
ticore System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture family of processors to address these issues. As will be
shown in this book, Texas Instruments introduced innovations at many levels, such as: powerful
CPUs that support both fixed- and floating-point arithmetic (instruction by instruction) that can
achieve more than 40G multiplications/core, a Navigator that enables direct communication
between cores and memory access that removes data movement bottlenecks, a Hyperlink inter-
face and advanced development tools.
The challenge is not only how many cores you can put on a piece of silicon, the processing
power of each core and how fast they can communicate, but also in the programming model
and ease of use. Unfortunately, programming models are not developed sufficiently to handle
several cores. The improvement in performance gained by the use of a multicore processor
depends very much on the application and software used. C and C++, which are commonly used
in embedded systems, do not support partitioning and, therefore, porting sequential code to
multicore is not trivial. In this book, it will be shown this complexity is alleviated by using:
OpenMP, which is an Application Programming Interface (API) that supports multiplatform
shared multiprocessing programming in C, C++ and Fortran; Open Computing Language
(OpenCL); or the Inter-Processor Communication (IPC).
This book will help to innovate by making the reader understand the KeyStone SoC architec-
tures, the development tools including debugging and various programming models with tested
examples, and also help to broaden the knowledge by critically analysing each element (see
Table of Contents) and understanding how these elements are working together. With the sheer
number of practical examples and references provided, the reader will be able to quickly develop
applications, take advantage of maximum performance and functionality of the processors, be
able to easily use the tools to develop and debug applications and find the relevant references to
pertinent material. Real-time multicore audio and video applications are provided. Applications
will be based on TI’s Multicor e Software Development Kit (MCSDK), hand-optimised code,
OpenMP, OpenCL and IPC.
Due to the sheer amount of documentation available, some information is either referred to or
reproduced to avoid discontinuity and misinterpretation.
This book is divided into 20 chapters. Chapters 1 to 15 deal with the hardware and software
issues, and Chapters 16 to 20 deal with applications. Most of the concepts are backed up with
laboratory experiments and demos that have been thoroughly tested.
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