Following on the heels of the first Multicore Expo in Santa Clara, the first European Multicore Expo will be held later this year in Germany on November 14 -15 at the Electronica trade show in Munich.

Dualcore Semiconductor has announced its DCIC9970 device which contains two ARM9 cores.

The Parallax Propeller contains eight 32-bit CPUs in some interesting low pin count packages, including a 40-pin DIP.

A Year Later, Dual-Core Software Is Still Lacking

Investor’s Business Daily (04/18/06) P. A8; Detar, James; Seitz, Patrick

A year ago Tuesday, the first PCs powered by Intel dual-core chips appeared in stores, but the software for the chips has evolved at a disappointing pace, industry executives say. While hardware often precedes software on the development curve, too great of a gap could dissuade consumers and investors from embracing dual-core technology. Although developing software for dual-core chips is difficult, says analyst Roger Kay, Intel plans to incorporate dual-core technology into 70 percent of the notebooks and desktops that it powers by the end of the year, and 85 percent of servers, said the company’s Rob Crooke. Until software developers optimize their applications for dual-core processors, however, consumers are unlikely to see much benefit. “Any time you move software code to a new model, it isn’t something you just snap your fingers and do,” says Margaret Lewis of AMD, which debuted its first dual-core chip three days after Intel’s roll-out. “The reality is that people might put into a plan: ‘I’m going to create multithreaded code.’ But that code could be three months to 18 months from being released.” The principal benefit to materialize from the chips so far has been the increased speed at which a PC can simultaneously operate multiple applications, though for a single application to run faster, its code must be written so that its internal functions can be broken up to run at the same time. Programs such as spreadsheets are not likely to see any benefit from dual-core technology, which will primarily improve video, graphics, and other applications that demand a lot of processing power. The stronger selling point for most consumers is the ability to run multiple programs more efficiently.

(Editor’s Note: this came in an email with news clippings, but the link to the actual story was not available).

Teclast, a Chinese manufacturer of digital audio players has announced their C150 a dual core MP3 player. It is reported that one processor does the decode while the other does the audio processing.

Zoran has announced availability of its Quatro 4230 processor targetted at color laser printers. The SoC has a 400 MHz ARM11 CPU along with two 300 MHz Quatro SIMD DSP cores.