Hardware adapts to the software used
08 Dec 2011
"Designing a computer processor so that the software installed operates as efficiently as possible." That, in a nutshell, is the mission of the EU-funded research project 'embedded reconfigurable architectures' (ERA), which is coordinated by TU Delft.
Dynamic hardware that adapts to the characteristics of the software that will have to run on it allows a significant gain in speed and energy consumption. The first prototype has since become operational.
Dr Stephan Wong, ERA project leader says, "We are currently seeing the rise of many-core chips. These are chips that contain several processor cores which differ in size, performance and energy consumption. Per application, switches can be made between these cores. One example is the Tegra 3 chip, which has several high-performance cores and one low-performance / low-power processor core."
"The problem is that these chips are not yet properly aligned to the potentially different applications. We want to tackle that in the European ERA project.
A platform will be developed in the project that can dynamically adapt itself to the application. We therefore look at how you can dynamically generate one or more adapted processors on a configurable chip in order to make the most efficient use of the chip, depending on the software you want to use.
This means that you optimally configure the processors on the chip for each separate program.
The first prototype is operational. We anticipate that our ERA platform will ultimately lead to cheaper embedded systems such as those for mobile telephones, for example, and faster and more energy efficient products."
