Embedded Multi-core Processors

Designing multi-threaded and multi-core processor architectures has become one of the most challenging projects for computer scientists in the last few years. But not only the design of such architectures for desktop computers, servers, or high performance computing (HPC) clusters has been investigated in a sophisticated manner, also in the area of embedded systems, researchers have started to investigate the possibilities of using the newly acquired knowledge to implement multi-core processors for embedded systems. Unfortunately, such streamlined computers bring a whole lot of constraints to the design of processor in general. Just to name some of them, scientists have to deal with less memory available, less possibilities to cool the evolving heat, and last but not least, the most important design criteria means to be that embedded systems cannot provide the integrated processors with the same amount of power as the above mentioned systems (like servers or HPC clusters). But these are only a few of the main problems scientists were faced with in the early days of processor design, especially the design of multi-core processors for embedded systems. This paper will give the reader a profound overview of the main architectural approaches, currently used in field implementations and they will also be discussed. Furthermore the reader will be presented some of the available real life implementations of the various architectural approaches, which will as well be discussed in detail by pointing out their assets and drawbacks.