Jari Nurmi

Tampere University of Technology

An outlook of the future directions in processor design is provided in this chapter. Shortly, there will be

• More processors

• More application-tailored processors

• More parallelism in different forms

If we think of the technology development as predicted in the ITRS roadmap [208], it is clear that more and more processors will be crammed onto a single chip. The prediction of the roadmap is that we will see hundreds or even thousands of processors integrated within the next ten f ifteen years, e.g., 424 processing elements per chip in 2017. The trend can be confirmed by looking at some contemporary ambitious high-end projects in multi-core and multi-processor development. For example, Rapport, Inc. is shipping a chip with 256 processing elements on board and is developing a 1024-core processor, however these are only 8-bit elements [281]. Even in workstation processor complexity, Sun has announced an 8-core processor [109], and Intel and AMD have both announced quadcore ones [218]. Each of these processors also uses multi-threading on its cores. The CELL architecture with eight data processing cores and one control processor is a well-known development for high-end embedded systems, already in mass production [165].

So, there will be more processors in an integrated embedded system. But what kind of processors? My bet is that we will see more specialized processors for different specific tasks. The one size fits all approach simply cannot provide cost and power efficient enough solutions for the embedded...