iSuppli Corp. recently estimated that quad-core penetration in mainstream desktop PCs will rise to 5 percent this quarter and eventually reach nearly half of the market at 49 percent in Q4 of 2009. In-Stat meanwhile sees current multicore processors finding their place in servers. In the PC realm, however, the firm sees little performance benefits from homogenous multicore processors, but says that things will improve with the advent of more efficient heterogeneous ones.

Whatever is said about multicore processors, they're all still talking about them. Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. have demonstrated their commitment to competing on cores instead of frequency. Processors don't scale well on frequency because they are much faster than memory, and cache size increases can only help to a point. And increasing processor frequency at the same process node doubles power consumption.

Multicore processors, on the other hand, can take advantage of high-speed, shorter-length on-chip interconnects for intercore communication, which allows them to be clocked faster. They can independently implement optimizations such as superscalar execution, pipelining and multithreading. They also take up less space on a board compared with multiple processors.

So what's stopping them from taking the computing market by storm? It's the software. Years ago, Microsoft Corp. would introduce its next version of OS that looked better than its predecessor and was even claimed to work better. Consumers and enterprises would then upgrade their PCs with a faster processor made available by Intel in just the nick of time, and everyone would be happy.

With multicore processors, the tables have turned. We have the hardware waiting for software. To meet that demand, Intel recently announced a slew of programming and debugging tools. But developing applications that take advantage of the parallelism of multicore processors is still not easy. In multicore DSPs, for instance, the challenge is to effectively partition the workload among processor cores, and that challenge is growing bigger with the increasing number of cores and application functionality.

A similar challenge is faced by EDA tool companies. Some of them have built up (or acquired) an enormous array of IP and tools that fit neatly into suites taking engineers from design entry to verification and even virtual prototyping. While some applications that have been designed to run in distributed computing environments will be relatively easy to suit up for multicore processors, others won't. To be fair, Synopsys Inc., Cadence Design Systems Inc., Mentor Graphics Corp. and Magma Design Automation Inc.—the big four—offer tools with some level of support for multicore processing machines.

Despite the challenges, the trend toward multicore processing has injected new blood into both the silicon and EDA landscape. The challenges have in fact given an opportunity to new companies.

On the silicon side, for instance, Stream Processors Inc. is showing off a new DSP architecture that uses a C model to ease programming massively parallel processors. Another company, picoChip, offers multicore DSP arrays for wireless systems that can be programmed in standard C or assembler. IntellaSys has a "scalable embedded array" of processors supported by tools based on VentureForth, a programming language based on Forth.

On the EDA side, there's CLK Design Automation Inc., which has a multithreaded incremental timing and signal integrity analyzer called Amber; Xoomsys Inc.'s XoomCKT, an upcoming fast Spice product that runs on networked computers and multicore processors; Extreme DA with GoldTime, a multithreaded static and statistical timing analyzer; Averant Inc.'s multi-CPU Solidify 5.0 formal-analysis software; and Nascentric Inc., which has previewed its AuSim MT, a multithreaded fast Spice simulator for multicore platforms.

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