Suppliers, both software and hardware, continue to announce new products and services to support, in particular, multicore device/system development. As a matter of fact it is a keyword similar to Android, virtualization, hypervisors, security, etc. that are a must in any marketing campaign to improve SEO and grab attention. But how ready are embedded engineers to actually use multicore/multiprocessing in their development?
According to VDC’s 2010 Embedded Engineering Survey slightly less than half cited they have no experience with multicore/multiprocessing designs. No big surprise considering 62% of current projects being developed at the time of the survey cited single processor architectures. Also no big surprise that engineers developing mobile phones, consumer electronics, and telecom/datacom devices/systems cited the highest levels of current experience.
However, flash forward two years and the same engineers expect that almost 62% of projects under development at that time will require multicore and/or multiprocessing architectures. Quite a shift expected in a short period of time!
For suppliers, this migration will present challenges to many embedded engineers that will translate to commercial opportunities to support customers with system engineering services, training, etc. Are you ready?