editor's blog
Subscribe Now

Multicore and Concurrency

In this week’s multicore automation article, we talked about multicore and we talked about concurrency. It’s easy to conflate these two concepts, so an important distinction should be drawn. The terminology isn’t particularly precise here, but the notions are.

“Multicore” typically refers to a computing platform. The number associated with it is the number of cores available for running a program. This number is completely independent of the program being run (although for embedded systems, it may have been designed with a specific program in mind).

“Concurrency” is a property of a program. It reflects how easy it is to pull apart and parallelize. It has nothing to do with a computing platform. A given algorithm can be designed with more or less opportunity for concurrency.

In a perfect world, the multicore structure matches the concurrency of the program being run. In the real world, a given program may need to be made to work on a number of different platforms. The more concurrency opportunities there are in a program, the more it can be optimized for different multicore platforms. If it’s really only possible to split a program in two, then a four-core platform will be no better than a two-core platform.

For this reason, it can be beneficial to optimize your program for as much concurrency as possible so that it can be partitioned in many different ways over many different platforms.

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Jul 1, 2025
I don't know which of these videos is better: humans playing games with water pixels or robots playing games....

Libby's Lab

Libby's Lab - Scopes out Littelfuse C&K Aerospace AeroSplice Connectors

Sponsored by Mouser Electronics and Littelfuse

Join Libby and Demo in this episode of “Libby’s Lab” as they explore the Littelfuse C&K Aerospace Aerosplice Connectors, available at Mouser.com! These connectors are ideal for high-reliability easy-to-use wire-to-wire connections in aerospace applications. Keep your circuits charged and your ideas sparking!

Click here for more information

featured paper

Agilex™ 3 vs. Certus-N2 Devices: Head-to-Head Benchmarking on 10 OpenCores Designs

Sponsored by Altera

Explore how Agilex™ 3 FPGAs deliver up to 2.4× higher performance and 30% lower power than comparable low-cost FPGAs in embedded applications. This white paper benchmarks real workloads, highlights key architectural advantages, and shows how Agilex 3 enables efficient AI, vision, and control systems with headroom to scale.

Click to read more

featured chalk talk

Vector Funnel Methodology for Power Analysis from Emulation to RTL to Signoff
Sponsored by Synopsys
The shift left methodology can help lower power throughout the electronic design cycle. In this episode of Chalk Talk, William Ruby from Synopsys and Amelia Dalton explore the biggest energy efficiency design challenges facing engineers today, how Synopsys can help solve a variety of energy efficiency design challenges and how the shift left methodology can enable consistent power efficiency and power reduction.
Jul 29, 2024
256,041 views