Toshiba Unveils Low Power Operating System for Many-Core Processors

Recent multimedia processing, including video encoding and decoding and image recognition, requires high performance processors. But equally, manufactures are looking for a low power system in order to maximize the battery life of mobile devices in consideration of the environment.

Toshiba (News - Alert) Corporation, manufacturer, solutions provider and marketer of advanced electronic and electrical products and systems, recently confirmed that it has developed a new low power operating system (OS) for many-core processors, targeting application in embedded systems, including automotive products and digital consumer products.

An evaluation of the OS on the company's own many-core processor recorded a 24.6 percent power reduction against the standard OS when running a super resolution program that scaled 1920x1080 pixel images to 3840x2160 resolutions.

In current methodology, the OS controls power to the processor based on computation load history. However, this approach is not accurate enough to reduce power consumption and fails to manage abrupt fluctuations in computation load, so more power than necessary is consumed.

Toshiba's many-core processor OS is designed to achieve low power consumption by using information inherent to parallel programs to control power supply. Parallel programs are run by a thread unit, and to run correctly the order for executing the threads must be specified.

In a release, the company said that it has developed and employed a technique for specifying the "number of dependence" among threads and controlling the execution order. This approach recognizes that the dependency number at any given time closely foreshadows the computation load in the near future, securing a more accurate prediction of power requirements.

The new OS controls power supply and achieves a low power system without degradation in performance. Toshiba plans to apply the low power OS to embedded systems for such applications as high resolution image processing and image recognition.

Toshiba recently launched the latest addition to its TOSLINK fiber optic transmission device line-up: fiber optic transmission modules that can send and receive signals from DC to 500 kb/s with low consumption current up to a maximum distance of 10m when using APF (all plastic fiber).