The Quest for Simplicity

Modern software engineering practices and embedded systems development are often in conflict.

Software engineering has seen major progression in the last few decades – the way we design systems has changed with object oriented methods (including the ability to add layers of abstractions and generic types); inheritance has significantly altered how we implement systems, and garbage collection has improved many programmer’s sleep. Combined, these advances have given us improvements in maintainability, verification, reusability, and time to market.

The issue at hand is that not all of these mechanisms translate into efficient structures – the driving force between cost and energy savings. Examples of where it would be acceptable to deliver a system that needs twice the resources to operate, are few and far between.

In this talk we explore where the inefficiencies crept in and discover how simple software engineering can help to reclaim those losses.

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Live Q&A - The Quest for Simplicity

Live Q&A with Henk Muller for the theatre talk titled The Quest for Simplicity

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Back to the Future with Embedded Software (and Predictable Timing)

In this session, we will explore how we can still learn a thing or two from the past. The very first microprocessors employed a simple model that enabled programmers to reason about the speed of their programs - up to the clock-cycle precision. Taking advantage of this, some early computers generated video and audio streams directly from software. Over time, microprocessors and microcontrollers became faster and more complex, and they lost this property, making it harder for embedded programs to respond in a precise way. At the same time, embedded programs became more complex - and the focus shifted to executing multiple real-time tasks, simultaneously. 

Discover how we, at XMOS, have gone back to a computational model that enables the programmer to reason about time, and to write software that you proof once correct, and can re-use in different contexts. We offer a bag of 16 hardware threads that each have predictable timing. Each thread can be programmed in hard-real-time individually, and be composed with other threads without affecting each other’s timing. Offering both vector compute and IO compute, xcores can deal with 10 ns accurate IO timings from software, whilst offering up to a million FFTs per second (256 points) for DSP; all in a 7x7mm QFN. 

We will explain how the hardware enables event driven programming - where the compiler and programmer can reason about response times and throughput – which means that interrupts are mostly avoided. For computational code the compiler can verify the timing, so the programmer can guarantee that their DSP is fast enough to keep up with the IO.

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Live Q&A - Back to the Future with Embedded Software (and Predictable Timing)

Live Q&A with Henk Muller for the theatre talk titled Back to the Future with Embedded Software (and Predictable Timing)

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