Issues

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July 2011 Issue - EE Times Confidential

EXTRA!

Multi-screen wars: MediaTek/Mstar vs. Qualcomm, Marvell, Nvidia
The larger significance of the merging of Taiwan’s “M Brothers” may have escaped the notice of some western observers.

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EET ON THE QT

July 2011

Hybrid Processors Need a Better Road Map

Nextgeneration processors that intelligently mix generalpurpose and graphics cores hold plenty of promise. But silicon and software vendors need to do a better job paving the way to that future. That’s the view of Jem Davies, vice president of technology at ARM. Davies is calling for a new effort to define a set of highlevel standards for programming heterogeneous processors. Programmers need guidelines, and the sooner the better. The Khronos Group has established one good path with its OpenCL API. But Microsoft has another route with DirectCompute, its emerging facility in Windows aimed at C++ programmers. Google has a separate effort, called Renderscript, that’s focused on Java and Android. Nvidia stands apart with its Cuda environment for Nvidia GPUs. Intel has a foot in two camps, supporting OpenCL but pushing a lot of its own proprietary tools to program emerging generalpurpose graphics chips such as its Knights Corner, a manycore processor for big computer clusters.

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