The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 10)

Here Anant discusses his final area of innovation in Tilera, which is the piece which really supports their go-to-market strategy and allows companies to become early adopters of multicore processors.

SM: What is the final innovation? AA: The fifth and final innovation is in software. The third “P” is programmability. There, we have done some pretty big innovations.

We are not just a chip company; we have a huge effort in software. Alewife also had a huge software effort. The majority of the people in Raw and Alewife were software types. In our company, we have built the multicore development environment which is a complete suite of tools for multicore.

We had based the architecture upon established standards but hit the wall in terms of what these standards could support. Now you can build custom support for this chip in C. It is running on Linux, so you can run all standard, off the shelf, Linux programs by default. The two big things you need to worry about are tools for multicore and programming for multicore.

SM: Let’s delve a little bit deeper into each, starting with tools. AA: In regards to tools for multicore, the challenge here is immense. Just imagine if you want to debug on a multicore chip. What we built is performance evaluation tools, debugging utilities, performance evaluation utilities, etc.

Many multicore vendors will tell you to use existing sequential processor tools, but let’s examine how you would try to debug a program that way. You debug the programs by opening a GDB or debug window on every core. Now you are sitting there with 100 windows, and it is like juggling 100 balls in the air. Let’s say, you want to single step your program, you would have to type single step in every single window.

SM: That is just not doable. AA: Using those tools on state of the art multicore processors is like using tools from the dark ages. What we developed is a suite of tools where we take the “whole application” model. This model allows the user to debug the application, so I can open a window on the application and I can say “stop” at any point. All of the processes which are related to the application are stopped. In fact, if I desire, I can tell the whole chip to stop.

SM: What will that data dump give you? AA: It will let me look at the error code status, or whatever I want really. I can step the whole application if I would like.

[To Be Continued]

[Part 9]
[Part 8]
[Part 7]
[Part 6]
[Part 5]
[Part 4]
[Part 3]
[Part 2]
[Part 1]

This segment is part 10 in the series : The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal
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