Mobile SoCs still lacking good software model

Rick Merritt, EETimes
4/18/2013 10:45 AM EDT

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--The industry lacks consensus on how to program the heterogeneous mobile SoCs now on the rise in smartphones and tablets. But the good news is some promising power-friendly techniques are starting to emerge.

Senior engineers from Nvidia and Qualcomm said there’s no resolution in sight for the fragmented ways to handle mixtures of CPU, GPU and DSP cores in today’s mobile chips. Among the options, Android backs Renderscript, Apple helped launch OpenCL and Microsoft is driving Windows Direct Compute.

Qualcomm is taking an agnostic approach, trying to create SoCs that can work with any model. It is a member of the Khronos Group working on OpenCL and the AMD-led Heterogeneous Systems Architecture alliance.

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