The homogeneity of architecture in a heterogeneous world

It has long been accepted within embedded computing that using a heterogeneous core focused to a specific task can deliver improved performance and subsequent improved power efficiency. The challenge has always been how can the software programmer integrate this hardware diversity as workloads become generalized or often unknown at design time? Using library abstraction permits specific tasks to benefit from heterogeneity, but how can general purpose code benefit? This talk will describe the hardware and software techniques currently being developed in next generation ARM based SoC to address the challenge of maintaining the homogeneity of the software architecture while extending to the benefits of heterogeneity in hardware.