John Blyler: Let’s start with the high level, domain specific trend in embedded, low power systems. What do you see?

Jonathan Luse: The trend is two-fold. First, you have intelligence being added to all kinds of devices. Second, you have the continuing trend of connectivity. By about 2013 or 2015, we expect to see worldwide about 15 billion connected devices, everything from mainframe and servers to cell phones and embedded devices. Some of these embedded devices will be seen, but many will be unseen or in the background.

JB: What is an example of connected yet intelligent devices?

JL: An easy example is the navigation system in your car, whether it’s integrated into you car or a portable unit. One standard feature of these devices is the capability to connect with traffic monitoring systems. If the navigation devices was a bit more intelligent and connected, it could reroute you based upon traffic optimization. That’s just one example of adding connectivity and intelligence to a device.

Another example–focused on low power systems–is in the energy delivery mechanisms for power. Alternative energy sources are interesting and will add new forces of power to the grid. But you have a huge infrastructure of existing power generation plants and manufacturing plants that consume electricity. Intelligent low power and connected devices could really help make that entire infrastructure more efficient. Imagine the scenario if each consumer had a smart power meter at their home that could communicate back to the power station. That way, these smart meters could tell both the consumers and power generators how the energy was being spent. Studies have shown that if consumers just knew where they were inefficient in their power usage–regardless of taking any action–they themselves could reduce their electricity bill by 10%.

JB: Many technology pundits talk about the coming “sensor swarm,’ i.e., the increase in the use of sensors in all kinds of connected applications. Such applications would be well suited for a micro-controller architecture rather than a general purpose processor. How do you see the intelligence being distributed in such a system?

JL: I would see basic intelligence being added at the sensor level too, which might aggregate into a programmable logic controller (PLC)–a computer used for automation of electromechanical processes. At the controller level, you might need an embedded processor, like the ATOM. Depending upon the number of interfaces or inputs/ outputs, you might have some physically distributed activities that required a more traditional processor. Then you might have more massive programmable controllers that require a lot of power, so they would go to a dual or quad core processor. In fact, a lot of companies that use PLC technology have been using Intel inside their medium and high end systems for the more intensive processing tasks. But we’ve never given them a 5-watt solution to put into their entry-level PLC applications. Now, with the low power embedded processors like the ATOM, they have an entry level product.

JB: This is not the first time that Intel has entered the embedded market. What makes this entrance different?

JL: Intel has had processors in the mobile, desktop and servers markets for a long time. One example in the embedded space is the xScale, which is a low power device. The main difference now with the embedded ATOM family is that it is instruction set compatible with the rest of our embedded roadmap.

One thing I’ve heard our customers say is that the xScale is good if it’s used in an isolated application that doesn’t require scalability. But many companies want a good, better, and best strategy. From our perspective, the ATOM is the good, the Celeron is the better and the Core-2 Duo is the best for these clients. The benefits that they see are design scalability and architectural scalability as well as software scalability. They can go top to bottom of their own software stack to include the right features at the right level of product offering and only have to do it once. These customers don’t have to manage multiple architectures, since the ATOM and higher processors are all based on Intel’s IA architectures.

Ed Sperling: Are these software stacks changing? I know that a lot of legacy software has been remarkably inefficient, since it was developed to run on a general purpose operating system that then runs on a general purpose processor.

JL: To answer that question, I need to explain my day job. I’m Director of Marketing for the Low Power Embedded Products Division, which includes the ATOM processors. But in that role, I’m also responsible for the embedded software group.

From that perspective, I see that the big trend in the last 5 to 6 years has been from proprietary to off-the-shelf systems. Let me explain. When times were good, companies were vertically integrated in their stacks, their solution, from hardware and hardware-aware Basic Input/Output Systems (BIOS) to software Operating Systems (OS) and applications. Companies developed it all – homegrown and proprietary. After a while, though, the companies realized that they weren’t getting any real value for the middle portions of the stack – the BIOS, OS and some of the middleware. In addition, these companies understood that a proprietary OS or BIOS wasn’t where their core intellectual property resided, as opposed to an open OS or BIOS. The strength of these particular companies was in the creation of acceleration software that made the existing hardware run faster, e.g., packet processing or a user interface.

From this trend I realized that the middle portion of the
stack – from silicon to applications – largely moved from
proprietary home grown OSs and BIOSes to commercial
off-the-shelf versions that had become “good enough.”
Today, few of these companies use proprietary OSs. Instead,
they’ve moved from a completely vertical integrated stack
to an off-the-shelf model.

JB: Your example of the GUI developer or packet processing makes me wonder if we’ll soon see a multicore version of the ATOM. You could run your embedded legacy code on one core and the new code–say, a GUI–on the other core.

JL: Well, I’m not here to launch any new products. But consider Intel’s direction as a company. We’ve gone multicore with everything over time, as a way to extract more performance. The reason is the way that silicon substrates work, i.e., if you dial up the last 15% of a processor’s maximum frequency, then you basically double your power consumption. Conversely, if I dial back my frequency by about 15% of the maximum, then the power drops by about half. Further, if I have a second core, then the power decrease almost pays for the second core. Now I’m at 170 percent performance verses 100 percent performance for approximately the same power.

I’m not trying to tip my hand. But you can see the direction of Intel’s processors. Multicore architectures are a very good way of getting more performance for the same power out, which makes for a very good low-power story.

John Blyler is the Editorial Director of Extension Media, which publishes Chip Design and Embedded Intel magazine, plus over 36 EECatalog Resource Catalogs in vertical market areas. He has co-authored several books on technology (Wiley and Elsevier). John has over 23 years systems engineering hardwaresoftware experience in the electronics industry. He remains an affiliate professor in Systems Engineering at Portland State University.