Open event machine: A multi-core run-time designed for performance

The early generations of TI\´s multi-core DSPs had limited support for multi-core programming. Programmers typically looked at those DSPs as "multiple single-core DSPs in a single package". The integration effectively allowed achieving more revenue for a given area and power budget and SW reuse allowed keeping the development cost low. The KeyStone family gathers the latest generations of multi-core DSPs. All members of the KeyStone family are built around the Multicore Navigator. This new multi-core infrastructure makes it possible to further reduce the cost per channel by enabling multicore programming. The Open Event Machine (OpenEM) is a multi-core runtime system developed for the KeyStone family. The main missions of OpenEM are to enable efficient scheduling, dispatching and load balancing of work across the cores of a KeyStone device, as well as efficient high-speed communication between KeyStone devices. This paper describes the operation and illustrates the performance of OpenEM.