Welcome to our November 2009 Newsletter!

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend the MultiCore Expo in Santa Clara, California.  As its name implies, it is an industry event that focuses on all things multi-core, including the exhibit of products from various chip vendors, operating system vendors, and software tool vendors that are now supporting development and execution on multi-processor or multi-core systems.  There were also a number of very interesting presentations surrounding the technology and futures of multi-core systems.

One presentation that especially caught my attention dealt with the changing expectation of the new breed of computer users, myself included, who are increasingly dissatisfied with the number of different devices we all use to get our jobs done.  Being an increasing society of mobility, we have a number of devices to do our daily work and manage our personal lives.  Once only encumbered with a laptop computer and simple cell phone, we now have personal devices for our music, pictures, or video content.  Our simple cell phones have now grown to takes pictures store and play music, search the web, do our email.  Other devices store and play back e-books or play DVDs.

As more-and-more mobile workers and individual consumers increase their taste for mobility, it is clear, as the presenter put it, "People want EVERYTHING... EVERYWHERE... All The TIME".  And with so much content to see, hear, and compute with in smaller spaces and with requirements for longer battery life, multi-core devices will, of necessity permeate all new mobile platforms.

This new mobility and the challenge of building efficient multi-core systems requires changes in thinking about how to build and deploy software.  To take advantage of multi-core processors and get the performance gains they offer is not as easy as recompiling code, and until recently, the tools and operating systems were not available to fully utilize multi-core execution, especially in embedded devices.

In this newsletter, you will read about new product features from Aonix to address this new, unbridled future.  And in our Technology Insight section, you'll get some great advice about facing the challenges of building multi-core systems.