Linley

Linley Gwenapp

Among the 4 MPR musketeers, Linley Gwenapp was the best at reconverting from CPU centric to platform. Remarkably he did it very early (1999-2000) by jumping on the NPU bandwagon.

1. At first, he was presenting special sessions at MPF (and maybe HC).
2. Then as MPF folded, he created his own group (www.linleygroup.com) which is THE reference in NPU or more exactly in platforms in the infrastructure ( more than networking) space.
3. And frankly we wish they would expand in other spaces.

Still from our perspective we will list the interesting features offered by NPU and infrastructure platforms (for deeper understanding the reader should refer to the above reference)

• Complex SOC architecture where bandwidth and sometimes latency are critical
• --> advances in buses and fabrics.
• Naturally prone to multi-processing (MP) either as multi-cores or innovative multi-chips (good luck for latency).
• --> advances in partitioning and topology
• Even better, first serious implementations of MT (see Mario the MultiThread Champion) circa 2000.
• Large diversity of Coprocessors.