Multicore with virtualisation a solution for next gen smart phones?

Embedded Multicore Processing for Mobile Communications (eMuCo) explores the principles, suitability and commercial feasibility of multicore and virtualisation as a solution to provide higher computational performance and flexibility, while retaining low power consumption. The proposal is supported by the European Union. Attila Bilgic, co-coordinator of the eMuCo project, said: "Today's smartphone users want to download applications and individually customise their phones according to their needs and preferences, download applications and keep protection of personal data and basic system against viruses and malicious code can be prevented through virtualisation". As one of the outputs of the project, the eMuCo software platform has been released as open source on June 8th 2010. It has been designed to enable efficient usage of multicores on mobile embedded computing devices by using virtualisation techniques. The platform is based on a small operating system kernel accompanied with various operating system components allowing usage in a wide range of applications. "The system opens access to the latest embedded multicore architectures offering efficient programming and processing of a broad range of different applications, ranging from special purpose applications such as protocol implementation to whole virtualised commodity operating systems," said Adam Lackorzynski, operating system architect. The spectrum of applications for mobile phones will be broader with the higher processing capacity brought by multicore and the system flexibility brought by virtualisation. "A multicore and virtualisation solution enables higher processing capacity keeping the power consumption with the added value of security and flexibility to bring services and applications fast to market making possible a new generation of smartphones," said Maria Elizabeth Gonzalez co-coordinator of the eMuCo project. "It is expected that the emerging multicore and virtualisation technology will revolutionise how a mobile phone will be perceived and opens new business models in the telecommunication market".