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.
Tag Archives: Infineon
S4D 2010
Is Cycle Accuracy a bad Idea?
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.
Tri-core or Tricore or TriCore(tm)
I do find it kind of funny when marketing names go bad in unexpected ways of collide in unexpected ways. There is this fairly old Infineon combined DSP/MCU core called TriCore (the name means it is both a RISC, a DSP, and an MCU). It was a nice name, easy to recognize, easy to pronounce, unlike the competition at the time. Today though, we are seeing multicore chips with three cores on the die. So what are these, if not tri-core chips, in analog with single- dual- quad- oct- etc. And this makes it very necessary to use the hyphen. For example, the Freescale recent StarCore 8113 chip with three cores has its press release explicitly headed tri-core with an hyphen. I guess marketing would have liked the more visually pleasing tricore moniker along with dualcore, which looks fairly established.
Ah well, not to mention the fun Infineon will have if it launches a triple-core TriCore device. Maybe in a third generation TriCore 3? The power of three, indeed. TriTriTriCore possibly?