Mar 21, 2011 14:11 GMT  ·  By

AMD has just announced that it has joined the ranks of the Multicore Association, a global non-profit organization focused on developing standards that help speed time to market for products that involve multicore implementations, as an executive board member.

The Multicore Association was founded in 2005 and includes some of the industry's biggest names such as Freescale Semiconductor, Intel, LG Electronics, LSI, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Siemens, Texas Instruments, and many others.

In 2008, the association released its first specifications, the Multicore Communications API or MCAPI for short, that was specifically designed in order to simplify the communication and synchronization of closely distributed embedded systems.

Other workgroups within the association are developing new standards in areas such as multicore virtual machine standardization, multicore resource management, multicore programming practices, and application debugging.

As an executive board member, AMD will help determine the overall direction of the organization and will also help it deploy new standards for multicore solutions in high-performance consumer and embedded systems.

“As an industry leader in heterogeneous computing, AMD strongly supports the MCA and its mission to guide the long-term development of open standards for multicore solutions,” said Chekib Akrout, senior vice president and general manager of technology development, AMD.

“Our history is marked by a commitment to innovation that's truly useful for customers, as well as dedication to open standards and a broad ecosystem that furthers industry-wide collaboration. Our work with MCA supports that commitment.

“As combinations of CPU and GPU processing engines become increasingly relevant to consumer electronics, especially for mobile Internet devices and many embedded systems which require low power consumption as well as high performance, there is great potential for the Multicore Association, AMD and others in the industry to work together and advance the technology,” concluded the company's rep.