High-Performance Multiprocessor System on Chip: Trends in Chip Architecture for the Mass Market

The proliferation of embedded processors in recent years is astonishing. The most obvious example is mobile phones, with annual sales of over a billion units. Such volumes clearly form a “mass market,” but other businesses also involve huge unit processor volumes as well. These include microcontrollers, enterprise (e.g., disk drive controllers), home entertainment (HDTV), automotive, and more. Historically, most of these have been single processor systems, or collections of single processor subsystems, rather than true multiprocessor systems, and as such are not of direct relevance to the topic of this book, but the same trends that are driving the move to multiprocessing in other domains are at work in these mass markets as well. To see why, let us look in more detail at the example of a mobile phone.