While we see computers these days coming with multi-core CPUs, the winds of change do not stop there. Even consumer products ranging from car audio and navigation systems to future portable media players, digital cameras, and cellphones, and industrial equipment will soon be on the receiving end of dual-core technology, courtesy of Renesas Technology and its latest SuperH line of microcontrollers that were announced on Monday. This multi-core design was developed by Renesas after the company discovered that it encountered the same wall in performance that other CPU manufacturers did with the traditional approach of cramming in as many process nodes as possible onto a single chip for smaller and faster chips.

The multi-core solution aims to bypass such problems while offering notable benefits at the same time such as running different operating systems simultaneously on different cores, although it is hard to see why anyone would want to do that on a small, portable device like cellphones and portable media players. Renesas also claims that the new line of SuperH microcontrollers will be even more flexible in their potential applications, where the 200MHz processor will be able to execute a whopping 480 million instructions per second and 400 million floating point operations per second.

The dual core chips will also come with a bunch of additional on-chip capabilities such as USB 2.0 interface, ATAPI interface, a 2D graphics engine, video output, and a multi-function timer that works great for motor control. A specific model will even come with an accelerator for AAC audio encoding. Interested parties will be able to pick up these microcontrollers this July for between $21 and $23.

Source: Digital Trends