As multi-core processors become an integral part of the embedded landscape, designers of real-time systems are looking for the best way to take advantage of the improved performance and flexible architecture while minimizing software rework. Designers want to incorporate multi-core architecture to boost performance through parallel processing and to minimize hardware costs by combining platforms. Because of the long life cycle of many embedded applications, designers must also interact with mul...Read More

As designers transition to the latest generation multicore processors, software must be divided into separate partitions to gain the performance benefits of parallel execution.  With Intel® Core™ processors, developers have access to multiple techniques to enable this performance gain including symmetric or asymmetric multiprocessing and virtualization. In the symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configuration, a single operating system allocates threads or tasks across the available...Read More

The Intel Developer Forum is this week (September 13-15), and we have some exciting training and demonstrations prepared around firmware and boot loaders for Intel® architecture.   Of course, the Embedded group is presenting a course on the Intel® Boot Loader Development Kit (Intel® BLDK) titled Reshaping the Intel® Architecture Firmware Landscape using Intel® Boot Loader Development Kit (Intel® BLDK) for Embedded Designs .  Cris Rhodes is a long-time ...Read More

As embedded systems increase in complexity while combining dissimilar functionality, designers are turning to virtual processors hosting multiple operating systems to insure unimpeded, deterministic response to real-time events while simultaneously providing users and operators with a high-level, graphics-based interface. Although this virtualization approach allows the development team to independently allocate system resources including memory and I/O to each operating environment, security, ...Read More

The Tech Report recently reviewed a Gigabyte motherboard using a " Hybrid EFI " BIOS. It's true that this Gigabyte implementation isn't UEFI from the ground up, which makes it different from most UEFI implementations in the market. I think we need to take a look at the Gigabyte Hybrid EFI implementation and understand exactly what it does.   Gigabyte's " Hybrid EFI Technology " is pretty simple ... stick a UEFI layer on top of the existing legacy BIOS so users get support for 2TB+ hard...Read More

In many industrial situations embedded designers are faced with the challenge of combining slower legacy interface circuitry with the latest high-speed control devices and multiple displays. Often the resulting system includes the original hardware with its operating system and application software plus a completely separate controller with software to handle the newer requirements. This approach obviously increases component count and power requirements and does nothing to increase the perform...Read More