SOURCES OF RISK

摘要

As contemporary processor offerings pack more features and on-chip resources into single packages, it becomes increasingly more difficult and time-consuming for a developer to leam and understand how all of the parts of the entire system operate together. An effective way to improve the productivity of developers is to use operating systems, BIOS, drivers, software libraries, development kits, and feature-rich software-development-tool suites. However, these productivity tools take time—typically, a few months—to build and test against the actual processor when it first becomes available. Early adopters might need to work with the processor before any of these productivity tools target the processor core they are using. One work-around for this problem is to use a simulator or an available processor that is similar to the new one; the corresponding risk is that the new processor implements some features in a subtly different way that will require the early adopter to rework a portion of the system to accommodate those differences once they are identified.