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Observations from Uppsala Computer Simulation, Virtual Platforms, Embedded Programming, Multicore and More (by Jakob Engblom)

Tag Archives: Arm

Two Cores, Four Cores, Eight Cores – Mobile Variety

2013 March 3 22:26 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

Probably thanks to the yearly Mobile World Congress, there have been a slew of recent announcements of mobile application processors recently. Everything is ARM-based, but show quite some variety in the CPU core configurations used. Indeed, I think this variety has something to say on the general state of multicore.

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Posted in: computer architecture, multicore computer architecture, multicore software / Tagged: ARM, bigLITTLE, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A7, Cortex-A9, eQuad, mobile, MP6530, Renesas, ST Ericsson

Does ISA Matter for Performance?

2012 December 23 22:54 / 6 Comments / Jakob

When I grew up with computers, the big RISC vs CISC debate was raging. At the time, in the late 1980s, it did indeed seem that RISC was inherently superior to CISC. SPARCs, MIPS, and Alpha all outpaced boring old x86, VAX and 68000 processors. This turned out to be a historical parenthesis, as the Pentium Pro from Intel showed how RISC-style performance could be mated to a CISC ISA. However, maybe ISAs still do matter.

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Posted in: computer architecture / Tagged: 32-bit, 64-bit, 68000, ARM, CISC, instruction set architecture, Intel, ISA, MIPS, performance optimization, power architecture, RISC, SPARC, x86

Nvidia “Kal-El” Variable SMP

2011 September 23 21:16 / 2 Comments / Jakob

Nvidia recently announced that their already-known “Kal-El” quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 SoC actually contains five processor cores, not just four as a “normal” quad-core would. They call the architecture “Variable SMP”, and it is a pretty smart design. The one where you think, “I should have thought of that”, which is the best sign of something truly good.

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Posted in: computer architecture, multicore computer architecture / Tagged: ARM, heterogeneous, Kal-El, Nvidia

Steve Furber: Emulated BBC Micro on Archimedes on PC

2011 August 13 11:35 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

I just read an interview with Steve Furber, the original ARM designer, in the May 2011 issue of the Communications of the ACM. It is a good read about the early days of the home computing revolution in the UK. He not only designed the ARM processor, but also the BBC Micro and some other early machines.

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Posted in: computer simulation technology, history of computing / Tagged: ACORN Archimedes, ARM, BBC Micro, Communications of the ACM, Steve Furber

Memory Models: x86 is TSO, TSO is Good

2011 June 22 17:16 / 1 Comment / Jakob

By chance, I got to attend a day at the UPMARC Summer School with a very enjoyable talk by Francesco Zappa Nardelli from INRIA. He described his work (along with others) on understanding and modeling multiprocessor memory models. It is a very complex subject, but he managed to explain it very well.

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Posted in: computer simulation technology, conferences, multicore computer architecture, multicore software, parallel computing / Tagged: ARM, Doug Lea, Francesco Zappa Nardelli, memory consistency, power architecture, SPARC, UpMarc, x86

S4D 2010

2010 September 15 09:02 / 12 Comments / Jakob

Looks like S4D (and the co-located FDL) is becoming my most regular conference. S4D is a very interactive event. With some 20 to 30 people in the room, many of them also presenting papers at the conference, it turns into a workshop at its best. There were plenty of discussion going on during sessions and the breaks, and I think we all got new insights and ideas.

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Posted in: appearances, computer simulation technology, conferences, EDA, multicore debug, security, virtual platforms / Tagged: ARM, Debug, ESCUG, FDL, Infineon, Intel, John Aynsley, Pat Brouillette, S4D, Simon Davidmann, Southampton, ST, SystemC, Thorsten Grötker, TrustZone

Microsoft + ARM = ARM64?

2010 July 27 20:57 / 1 Comment / Jakob

The recent news that Microsoft has taken out an ARM architectural license has caused a lot of speculation about just what this might mean. There are several quite well reasoned ideas around the web, and I have one idea of my own: sixty-four bits.

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Posted in: business issues, computer architecture / Tagged: apple, ARM, Microsoft, Windows

Concurrency in Lego Mindstorms NXT

2010 January 8 22:19 / 3 Comments / Jakob

lego mindstorms nxt2

For my parental leave, I have just bought myself a Lego Mindstorm NXT 2.0 kit. It is not much fun for our youngest, who mostly gets a bit scared by a piece of Lego driving around making noises, but I hope to be able to use it to teach my older child (almost five) to program. Let’s see how that turns out. It looks hard to make the NXT environment provide the kind of Roborally-style programming blocks that I had hoped to create, as I cannot for some reason get a sufficiently custom icon onto custom blocks.

It also presented me with an opportunity to try some domain-specific high-level graphical programming. The programming environment provided for the NXT series of Mindstorms kits is based on LabView from National Instruments, and it really does seem to work. It even features parallel tasks, which I tried to use…

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Posted in: parallel computing, programming / Tagged: ARM, AVR, Domain-specific languages, LabView, lego, Mindstorms, NXT, parallelized software

Is Cycle Accuracy a bad Idea?

2008 July 11 22:45 / 8 Comments / Jakob

In a funny coincidence, I published an article at SCDSource.com about the need for cycle-accurate models for virtual platforms on the same day that ARM announced that they were selling their cycle-accurate simulators and associated tool chain to Carbon Technology. That makes one wonder where cycle-accuracy is going, or whether it is a valid idea at all… is ARM right or am I right, or are we both right since we are talking about different things?

Let’s look at this in more detail.

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Posted in: computer simulation technology, EDA, ESL, virtual platforms / Tagged: AMD, ARM, Axys, Carbon Technology, clock-cycle models, CoWare, cycle accuracy, DEC, Grant Martin, IBM, Infineon, Intel, Modeling, rtl, scdsource

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