One size no longer fits all…
18th July 2008
PRIMUS has entered into a joint development venture with Symbian spinout SoftMachinery to develop an alternative to mobile operating systems currently on the market. The project, codenamed P9, is to create software development tools analogous to those used in silicon chip design, offering support for massively parallel processor architectures that will be available in the next few years.
Initially aimed at handheld multimedia appliances but equally applicable to number-crunching and datacentres, P9 technology promises unprecedented scalability over tens, hundreds, or even thousands of parallel processing cores. Crucially, these cores will collectively have vastly lower power requirements than traditional high-speed monolithic processing units because energy consumption rises with the square of clock speed.
Chris St John of PRIMUS commented “This is an incredibly exciting project with potential to transform the landscape of mobile devices. Mobile applications are increasingly hamstrung by the traditional hardware architectures dictated by current mobile operating systems such as Symbian, Android and Windows CE. Smartphones are wonderful but the user experience of slow operation and constant re-charging leaves a lot to be desired.“
Mel Russel of SoftMachinery continued “Holistic design of silicon, software, storage, and battery is needed to deliver not just tomorrow’s but even today’s user expectations. You can’t do that with a general purpose mobile operating system.“
The P9 consortium are now working with European and Chinese interests to secure funding to develop a demonstrator toolchain and example product.