Is this the first in-car navigation hardware to use multi-core processor performance? I have had a quick scan around and I cannot find anything similar.
NEC's NaviEngine1 has no fewer than four ARM11 MPcores carrying out multi-processing. With all that processing power it requires a fast internal bus and so NEC has integrated a Serial ATA interface.
I have reported before on the interesting phenomenon of students implement general purpose parallel processing system design on a PS3 games console.
I thought it was just a whacky idea to promote Cell or to keep the students amused. Not a bit of it. Multi-processor-based graphics engines may be good at rendering your Halo 3 images but they can also be put to use for other number-crunching tasks such as analysing geological data.
AMD is the latest big name in the PC industry to jump into tthe open source software community. The processor company is to participate in the Eclipse Foundation.
Does this endotrsement make Eclipse the only show in town for embedded system designers looking to go open source?
There is no real surprise to see Linux being adopted like the bargin of the century by the mobile phone industry.
The possibility to standardise on an essentially royalty-free, open source operating system for the next generation of PC-like mobile phones is too good to ignore.
But once again the naturally commercially aggressive chip companies have taken a simple concept and made it too complicated for its own good.
Toshiba’s approach to Cell differs from that of development partners Sony and IBM in that it sees the multiprocessor architecture as co-processor technology which sits alongside the host CPU, not replacing it.
“We do not want to get in to a battle creating the next host processor architecture,” Emily Shirley, head of product marketing at Toshiba Europe, told EW.
