Cavium ThunderX Server SoC Features up to 48 ARM 64-bit Cores

ARM SBSA specification for server supports up to 268,435,456 CPU cores for the second level of standardization on one or a combination of SoCs. We’re not quite up there just yet, but Cavium ThunderX is an ARM server SoC with up to 48 cores on a single chip, which is the highest number of cores I’ve ever heard of in an ARM SoC. The company created their own custom processor cores using an ARMv8 architecture license, designing an SoC complies with ARM’s Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) standard with the following key features: ARM based SoC that scales up from 8 to 48 cores with up to 2.5 GHz core frequency with 78K I-Cache, 32K D-Cache, and 16MB L2 cache. Fully cache coherent across dual sockets using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect (CCPI) Integrated I/O capacity with 100s of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth 4x DDR3/4 72-bit memory controllers supporting up to 1TB RAM […]

2012 Embedded Market Study – Software Development & Processors

I’ve just come across an Embedded System Study by UBM published in April 2012. The company surveyed over 1,700 professionals working on embedded systems who are mainly based in the US (56%),  but also in Europe (21%) and Asia (12%). The report is 87 long, but I found some of the slides are particularly interesting in regards to programming languages, operating systems and software life cycle, as well as processor/micro-controller choices. Unsurprisingly C (65%), C++ (20%) and assembler (5%) are still the main languages used for embedded software development. In this report, we also learn that the average team is composed of 14.5 members including 5.6 software engineers, 5.6 hardware engineers and 3.3 firmware engineers. 2012 was the first year they included QA Engineers and system integrators both with 2.6 members on average working on projects lasting from less than 6 months to over 25 months. UBM survey also provides a […]

MontaVista adds HTML5 and Android support to its GENIVI-Compliant Automotive Technology Platform

Montavista announced secure HTML5 and Android support to its Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) which is GENIVI Compliant. HTML5 support is provided via MontaVista’s ModiiTM Digital Media Solutions Platform. Both Android and HTML5 are made independant of critical part of the software as they are executed in a MontaVista Linux Container (isolated virtualized container environment). Here’s an excerpt of the press release: SANTA CLARA, Calif. – October 10th, 2011 – MontaVista® Software LLC, today announced secure HTML5 and Android support for its Automotive Technology Platform (ATP). The addition of HTML5 support is provided via MontaVista’s ModiiTM Digital Media Solutions Platform which adds a powerful HTML5-based UI Framework to its recently released GENIVI-Compliant Platform. The Android support delivers a high performance Android runtime environment, which opens up access to a vast number of popular applications from the entire Android ecosystem. Complementing the Android and HTML5 capabilities, MontaVista has implemented a unique dual-layered […]

What is GENIVI ? A Software Standard for the Automotive Industry

I’ve recently read in the news that a few operating systems had achieved GENIVI compliance. So let’s see what Wikipedia says about the GENIVI Alliance: The GENIVI Alliance was founded on March 2, 2009 by BMW Group, Delphi, GM, Intel, Magneti-Marelli, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Visteon, and Wind River Systems with the goal of establishing a globally competitive, Linux-based operating system, middleware and platform for the automotive in-vehicle infotainment industry. Since then, the alliance has expanded to more than 100 members who are working together to deliver an open and globally consistent software platform based on Linux for use by the whole car industry. So the clear goal here is to have some set of software specifications and standards (Currently GENEVI 1.0)  in the automotive industry in order to speed time to market and reduce the cost of developing Infotainment applications. GENIVI comes from a concatenation of Geneva and IVI (In-Vehicle […]