Vector Fabrics Newsletter: Thales cooperation, Mobile World Congress, Embedded World and quad-core cars
Showtime: CES done, Mobile World Congress, Embedded World next
This month saw us attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as well as the more technical HIPEAC conference in Paris. At CES we witnessed the introduction of many dual-core devices while Acer, Fujitsu, HTC, LG and Lenovo all showed quad-core products on display. The multicore race is clearly on, and if you’re not optimizing your software for parallel architectures yet, you most likely soon will be. See for yourself how easy it is to optimize for dual and quad core using our tool and register for a free evaluation. There’s no download or installation involved, since our tool runs inside the browser.
At the end of February two more important shows are going on at the same time. We’ll be at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, the prime mobile event of the year, and have a booth at the Embedded World show in Germany.
Let’s discuss how we can help you and your customers take advantage of multicore and set up a meeting by emailing mirte@vectorfabrics.com.
We moved into a bigger office
Vector Fabrics is expanding, and as a result we moved into a bigger and nicer office on January 13th. We’re still 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. Perhaps it goes without saying, but there is no disruption in our service.
Our new address:
Vonderweg 22
5616RM Eindhoven
The Netherlands
See our contact information
We’ve joined forces with Thales and INRIA in the PHARAON project
We recently announced that we’ve joined forces with Thales, INRIA, and a group of leading universities to ease software development for today’s increasingly parallel architectures are driving today’s consumer electronics and embedded systems. Our mobile devices today have rich graphical user interfaces, high-speed internet access, visual games, navigation and cameras, however, the underlying parallel hardware architectures that enable this expanded functionality have introduced two new complications that are addressed in this three-year European project effort: programming complexity and power consumption. We’re looking forward to working closely with this team and drive the state-of-the-art of software development a big step forward.
Read the full press release
This month’s Very Cool Feature highlight: Reduction expressions
Last month we highlighted our schedule overhead view, which shows the percentage of time spent on creating and cleaning up threads. This month’s Very Cool Feature is our new support for reduction expressions. This is a common parallel programming pattern found in many applications. Take for example the sum of absolute differences calculations found in video encode algorithms, highlighted below. Our tool automatically detects these expressions in loops in your program. It shows that these can be parallelized and provides a speed-up estimate. We then present the coding steps to partition the loop into multiple threads that each calculate partial results, which then get gathered up to provide the final result.
See this feature in action, register for a free evaluation
Multicore product of the month: quad-core automobiles
When talking about their next car, soon people won’t talk about “how many cylinders” anymore, but instead will ask “how many cores?”
At CES, NVIDIA announced that its Tegra 3 chips will power not just tablets and mobile phones. Now NVIDIA Tegra 3 also supports in-car entertainment systems. For starters, this will include Tesla's model S, though it's also going to find a home in Lamborghinis and Audis.
Read more about how vfEmbedded helps you write code for multicore cars.
Event Calender
| Mobile World Congress | February 27 – March 1, Barcelona, Spain | Please contact Marco Jacobs to set up a meeting: marco@vectorfabrics.com, +31-6504-55522 |
| Embedded World | February 28 – March 1, Nuremberg, Germany, Hall 4/4-607 | Please contact Mirte Maier to set up a meeting: mirte@vectorfabrics.com, +31 40 820-0960 |
| ESC Silicon Valley | March 26 – 29, San Jose, USA, ARM Pavilion, booth 1127 | Please contact Christian Graber to set up a meeting: christian@vectorfabrics.com, +1-650-224-5255 |
Please contact us at info@vectorfabrics.com to schedule a meeting with us at these shows. We are looking forward to speaking with you about your multicore development projects.