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Software Architecture

This article is part of our series on MPSoCs and General Computing.

Operating Systems

This new computer architecture is based on multiple heterogeneous RISC processors (CPUs). “Heterogeneous” means that the processors are not all the same. In such a system, each processor is of a size and type suitable for its particular task.

For instance, the processor that handles the computer's user interface can be different than the processors available for application programs. It can be a processor specially designed for that task, with its own operating system (OS) module. Different hardware companies can market different CPUs just for that, and different software companies can market an OS module for that. The OS for such a computer can be a combination of modules from different software vendors.

Microsoft OS

The Microsoft Windows OS is a CISC operating system that runs on Intel's IA instruction sets. RISC machines that run the Microsoft OS pretend they are CISC machines.

“AMD's RISC86 microarchitecture implements the IA-32 instruction set by internally decoding IA-32 instructions into the simpler, fixed-length RISC86 operations.” [ 1 ]

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was formerly an embedded chip manufacturer (where RISC processors are standard) and now produces chips that run Microsoft Windows, which is not an efficient operating system but is widely used. Modular operating systems need to be developed.

Footnotes:

1.	Jurij Silc, Borut Robic and Theo Ungerer, Processor Architecture (Springer, 1999), p. 176.

Linux

Unix is an operating system for uni-processors. It has a horizontal layer structure suitable for externally networking uni-processors.

“Linux is a complete Unix clone for Intel 386/486/Pentium machines.” [ 1 ]

Linux has been ported to RISC machines without requiring CISC emulation at the hardware level (as Microsoft requires). However, it is not component-oriented, and is therefore inefficient for general heterogeneous on-chip multiprocessing. Modular operating systems need to be developed.

1.	Yingxu Wang, “Operating Systems,” in Dorf (Ed.) The Engineering Handbook 2nd Ed. (CRC, 2005), p. 144-4.

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Tuesday, 06-Jan-2009 02:16:17 GMT