Software Development for Embedded Multi-core Systems

Chapter 4. Moving to Multi-core Intel Architecture

Key Points

• The choice of employing 32-bit or 64-bit Intel instruction set architecture (ISA) depends on your application’s needs. The Intel^® 64 ISA offers a larger addressable memory region and larger registers; however, it costs more in terms of data and instruction size.

• Porting legacy applications from architectures with big endian byte order may require making the code endian neutral, using binary translation software or using BiEndian Technology to deal with endianness issues.

• Understand the features of your target operating system (OS) with regard to taking advantage of multi-core processors. If your target OS does not support symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), the benefits of multi-threading ...