Creating Multiprocessing Solutions: Proprietary or Proliferate?

It's becoming obvious to many embedded system designers that multiprocessing is the next big trend in performance and power optimization. And whether it's a system based on symmetric multiprocessing or heterogeneous multiprocessing, it's also obvious that standards need to be put in place to make it easier for designers and to shorten time-to-market. In a new consortium, led by Markus Levy, API standards will be one of the focus areas for multiprocessing chips and systems. When talking about standards, it's recognized that there's a need for industry-recognized multiprocessing benchmarks. Currently, EEMBC's multiprocessing benchmark working group, led by John Goodacre of ARM, is focused on developing benchmarks aimed at multicore consumer applications.