ACE calls them “extreme architectures.” These are the processors that your mother told you to avoid because they’re just too darn hard to support. You can come up with the niftiest hardware features, but who’s going to figure out how to turn C code into something that will take advantage of them?

Well, ACE would say, “Don’t listen to your mother.” Their CoSy tool (I keep wanting to pronounce this “Co-Sigh,” you know, kind of like when you both lay back and realize that you both have something you need to talk about… but actually, ACE pronounces it “cozy”…) can take bizarre architectures and help you generate a compiler than optimizes the code it generates from a C program.

Where do you find these processors? In those dark alleys your mother told you to avoid? Perhaps… There might be one in that headset that that shady character is wearing. Don’t ask to take it apart and check; take our word for it.

But deeply-embedded processors that look nothing like the kind your mother likes, resembling them only in that they run code; they are found in the dark recesses of systems where every cycle counts for very specific functions. Like audio. Or video or communications or… well, your imagination is the limit.

Down there, you can sneer at power-of-two bit widths. You want precisely 11 bits? 17 bits? 19 bits? (These are prime examples…) You can do it, and CoSy will help you produce a compiler that allows a C program to use that data. You can also set custom alignment.

And the supported architectures don’t have to be on some “Here are the supported bizarre architectures”  list. If you build your own via ARC (now Synopsys) or Tensilica (now Cadence), for example, you can still use CoSy to generate the compiler.

You can find out more about their latest edition in their announcement.