Predicting trends is difficult even by the most connected industry experts, but one trend that's easy to spot is the widespread acceptance of multicore SoC. This is happening for a number of reasons.
First, it's been years since the workstation first adopted the multicore processor architecture to solve such issues as increasing performance and power concerns. While the adoption rate in workstations is now saturated and is fully supported by General Purpose OSs (GPOS), the embedded world is just now looking at ways to adopt multicore architecture.
Second, several SoC vendors have been providing multicore solutions including Cavium, Freescale, MIPS, and ARM; but up until now, these solutions have been limited to networking and used for performance enhancements rather than for low power.
The rest of the embedded industry has had limited hardware options available as low-power design is a driving factor. While the ARM 11 MPCore was ahead of its time, the Cortex-A9 MPCore design is ready for primetime and is gaining acceptance in the embedded marketplace.
As a result, SoC vendors have adopted the Cortex-A9 MPCore hardware as a basis for their next generation designs. Over a year ago, Texas Instruments pre-announced their next-generation OMAP designs in the OMAP 4 with a dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore, scheduled for production in the second-half of 2010. ST Microsystems has pre-announced their next generation consumer devices which will be based on the Cortex A9 MPCore.
