Multicore Association launches new working group for hardware abstracting

The Multicore Association launches a new working group called Software Hardware Interface for Multi-many core (SHIM) to provide a common interface for abstracting the hardware properties that matter to multicore software tools. The Multicore Association says unlike the IEEE IP-XACT standard that defines and describes electronic components for hardware design, the primary goal of the SHIM working group is to define an architecture description standard useful for software design. The SHIM working group to describe the architecture for hardware components such as the processor cores, the inter-core communication channels (in support of message passing protocols such as the Multicore Association’s MCAPI), the memory system (including hierarchy, topology, coherency, memory size, latency), the network-on-chip (NoC) and routing protocol, and hardware virtualization features. SHIM standard is said to be flexible enough to allow vendor-specific, non-standard architectural information for customized tools. SHIM standards are going to be made public, where as the vendor-specific information to remain confidential between the processor vendor and its development tool partners. SHIM standards to benefit tools such as performance estimation, system configuration and hardware modelling. The performance information is said to be critical for most software development tools whic...