Freescale, CriticalBlue Expand Collaboration on Embedded Multicore Software Development

Freescale Semiconductor and CriticalBlue Ltd have expanded their relationship with an alliance focused on streamlining embedded multicore software development for Freescale platforms. CriticalBlue’s Prism development environment will support a broader range of Freescale’s QorIQ and Power Architecture-based multicore products. In addition, the companies will co-develop tools, extensions and methods to help customers more easily migrate software developed for single core targets to multicore platforms, and to optimize parallel compute performance once the software has been migrated.

Many of Freescale’s QorIQ products include advanced accelerators capable of highly sophisticated communications packet processing. CriticalBlue will enhance its Prism toolset, enabling developers to fully leverage Freescale’s specialized QorIQ accelerators, while simultaneously optimizing the performance of on-chip cores.

The collaborative development program is expected to deliver highly productive tools engineered to help software developers identify and quickly quantify the benefits of more parallelization opportunities than ever before. The Prism solution will be enhanced to provide estimates of the impact of artifacts such as cache behavior, on-chip core pipelines and on-chip communication mechanisms; all of which are important when parallelizing software applications and can have a profound effect on end-product performance.

Prism is an award-winning Eclipse-based embedded multicore programming system that allows software engineers to easily access and realize the full potential of multicore processors without significant change to their development flow. Prism analyzes the behavior of code running on hardware development boards, virtual machines or platform simulators. It allows engineers to take their existing sequential code, and before making any changes, explore and analyze opportunities for concurrency.

CriticalBlue

Freescale Semiconductor

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