http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog Community en info@vectorfabrics.com Copyright 2012 2012-04-26T13:14:37+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/video_new_tutorial_on_vp8_optimization http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/video_new_tutorial_on_vp8_optimization#When:13:14:37Z We've posted a video demonstration of how the VP8 video codec can be optimized and parallelized using our vfEmbedded tool, resulting in a 2.5x speed-up on a 4-core machine. Enjoy!

]]> 2012-04-26T13:14:37+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/video_vector_fabrics_at_design_west http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/video_vector_fabrics_at_design_west#When:12:52:22Z Here's a video from the Design West (ESC) show this week in San Jose where we were exhibiting at the ARM pavilion. Andy Frame, CPU product manager at ARM, interviewed our sales director Christian Graber. The topic was of course our multicore programming tools.

]]> 2012-03-30T12:52:22+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/tux_cake_for_tommy http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/tux_cake_for_tommy#When:10:56:15Z Most of the time we're working hard on our tools to make it easy to parallelize and optimize your code, but once in we while we take some time to celebrate and have fun. Our Sr. FAE Klaas van Gend is a big fan of Linux and cake, so he decided to combine the two and make a Tux cake to celebrate Tommy Kamps' birthday. Happy birthday Tommy, and thanks for the cake Klaas!

]]> 2012-03-21T10:56:15+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/moving_into_a_bigger_office http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/moving_into_a_bigger_office#When:15:55:38Z Vector Fabrics is expanding, and as a result we’ll be moving into a bigger and nicer office on January 13th. We’ll still be in Eindhoven, the smartest region in the world, in the city center. Restaurants, hotels and the famous PSV soccer stadium are within a few walking minutes. The railway station is roughly a 10-minute walk. Perhaps it goes without saying, but there will be no disruption in our service.

]]> 2012-01-11T15:55:38+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/happy_new_year http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/happy_new_year#When:14:46:48Z We’re excited about 2012. More and more multicore products are being introduced, alleviating the need to optimize software applications for these high-performance processors. We’re moving into a new and larger office, as we’re expanding our team. We have many more good things to come in 2012. You can try our latest release, with many new features, and sign up for a free trial here. Click on the image below to view our happy new year wish. Multicore is our bread and butter, and thus our message can be viewed in single-core or multi-core fashion. Enjoy!

]]> 2012-01-10T14:46:48+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/multithreading_examples_for_c_programs http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/multithreading_examples_for_c_programs#When:16:32:48Z Have you ever parallelized a C or C++ program? Then you got a slowdown first, didn’t you? Parallelization is a tough call because of data dependencies hiding behind pointers, unclear multithreading overheads, unexpected processor and OS behaviour, let alone potential starvation and deadlocks. Luckily, in the past 40 years computer engineers have been constantly accumulating best practices of industry-proven solutions to common concurrency challenges. They call them parallelization patterns.

]]> 2011-11-18T16:32:48+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/power_consumption_omap4430_pandaboard http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/power_consumption_omap4430_pandaboard#When:09:24:52Z Recently, I performed a series of power measurements on Texas Instrument’s OMAP4430 mobile SoC. The aim of this experiment was to confirm that we can perform such energy consumption measurements with sufficient accuracy for software source-code optimization. The software parallelization tools of Vector Fabrics can be used to lower power consumption, and measurements like these are needed to verify our results. Furthermore, it was my goal to evaluate speed/power trade offs in re-mapping a compute kernel from the multi-core ARM Cortex-A9 host processor onto the PowerVR SGX graphics processing unit.

]]> 2011-11-17T09:24:52+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/parallelizing_with_vfembedded http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/parallelizing_with_vfembedded#When:07:45:14Z In this blog post I will explain how to use vfEmbedded to parallelize a small sequential C program. The program in question calculates the electric potential in a two dimensional plane created by a discrete set of point charges. The analysis and implementation of the recipes provided by vfEmbedded were done in three hours, speeding up the program with a factor 3.4.

]]> 2011-11-09T07:45:14+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/parallel_programming_quotes http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/parallel_programming_quotes#When:15:24:48Z Over the past few months I’ve read lots of great articles on multicore software development. In this blog I share a list of my top 10 favorite quotes.

]]> 2011-10-18T15:24:48+00:00 http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/build_it_and_they_will_come http://www.vectorfabrics.com/blog/item/build_it_and_they_will_come#When:08:34:17Z Recently, I attended the TVS-organized conference “The Multicore Challenge II: Programming Multicore Systems” at the University of the West of England in Bristol, the second in a series of multicore-focused events. The program is online, and the presentations have been made available as well. I recommend Marco Cornero’s talk highlighting ST Ericsson’s adoption of multicore for mobile devices, as well as the OpenCL-focused presentation by the University of Bristol’s Simon McIntosh- Smith.

]]> 2011-09-23T08:34:17+00:00