Since we launched the Embedded Computing Board (ECB) Resource Guide last month we have seen so much innovation in the embedded computing board world that I can now definitely say its not a sleepy market anymore! A good example was my lively conversation with Dr. Philipp Tomsich, CTO of Vienna, Austria based Theobroma Systems (pictured right) who is bringing high core count boards to market that embrace mobile technology. By embracing mobile I mean taking advantage of two major trends in mobile, the first is the interface that users expect to see (touch with high quality graphics) and the second is high performance multi-core processors at ever decreasing prices.
Philipp's early career was in supercomputing at Silicon Graphics but he pointed out that your mobile phone is now as powerful as the first supercomputers he worked on! Philipp moved from supercomputers to Embedded systems and spent time converting desktop applications to embedded environments and it was hard. One of the major challenges in Embedded according to Philipp is designers tend to be very hardware focused and they don't think about the total system design and critically they leave the user experience out of the equation until the end of the design process. He calls this "customer last" and says the embedded design flow is backwards because it flows from chip to board to system to user and it should be reversed.
But here is the first great insight that Philipp gave me which is the mobile user interface with touch control and fantastic graphics has become so ubiquitous that end users of all kinds of systems now expect this level of intuitive experience. Think about it, whenever we see a screen today (watch children in front of any screen) and we expect to be able to touch it and get a response. We also expect to see high quality graphics and in some embedded applications the graphics can clarify safety issues or alarms that red lights or sirens can't (designing with the end user in mind again). The other mobile trend Philipp is taking advantage of is multi-core and his philosophy is the more cores the better! Having many cores at your disposal gives you tremendous flexibility in the way you manage a system and you can dedicate say 2 cores to the main system which needs high performance and then use other cores for a GUI, communications or power management. Philipp's thinking is don't use less than 4 cores and in 2 new embedded computing boards from Theobroma Systems you see this approach come to life. First Theobroma Systems have taken a quad core processor from ARM partner Allwinner (the A31) and offer it in the Qseven board format:
So here we see commercial tablet market technology coming to the Embedded market with a high performance quad core ARM processor and HDMI.
Theobroma Systems have taken this concept even further with a very high performance communications processor from Applied Micro called the Helix 2 (press release here) which comes in quad and octa core 64 bit ARM versions and putting it on a COMexpress module for compute and communications intensive applications in Embedded markets.
Here is the block diagram:
This is a heck of a lot of multi-core performance on a COMExpress module but just as in the Allwinner board example it brings new capabilities to the embedded market which will address the end users needs of performance and user experience first rather than at the end of the design. So maybe these parts from Allwinner and Applied Micro which originally came from outside the traditional embedded market will become game changers?
To keep up with developments in the ARM Embedded world please check out this page Exploring the world of ARM based Embedded Computing Boards (ECB) and bookmark it to stay current.