The Next Convergence: High-performance and Mission-critical Markets Sylvain Girbal † , Miquel Moret´o ⋆,‡,⊙ , Arnaud Grasset † , Jaume Abella ‡ , Eduardo Qui˜ nones ‡ , Francisco J. Cazorla ‡,Φ , Sami Yehia Ψ,1 † Thales Research & Technology (TRT), France ⋆ Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain ‡ Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain ⊙ International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Berkeley, USA Φ Spanish National Research Council (IIIA-CSIC), Spain Ψ Intel Corporation, USA Abstract. The well-known convergence of the high-performance com- puting and the mobile markets has been a dominating factor in the com- puting market during the last two decades. In this paper we witness a new type of convergence between the mission-critical market (such as avionic or automotive) and the mainstream consumer electronics mar- ket. Such convergence is fuelled by the common needs of both markets for more reliability, support for mission-critical functionalities and the challenge of harnessing the unsustainable increases in safety margins to guarantee either correctness or timing. In this position paper, we present a description of this new convergence, as well as the main challenges and opportunities that it brings to computing industry. 1 Introduction A dominating factor in the computing market during the last two decades has been the convergence between the high-performance (HP) computing market pursuing for power efficiency and the embedded/mobile market pursuing for more performance and functionalities. This evolution has lead to: 1) several open standards to control the balance between low power and high performance in current processors, 2) several APIs to control the low-power hardware features from the software layers (e.g. Operating System, OS) and 3) core designs that can be easily retargeted to provide different performance-power design points depending on the target market. In this position paper we present our witnessed new type of convergence be- tween the mission critical market (such as the avionic, automotive, healthcare and robotic) and the mainstream consumer electronics market. Such convergence is fuelled by the increasing requirements of the mission critical market for per- formance and functionalities and the growing needs of the consumer electronics 1 This work was done while Sami Yehia was Research Engineer at Thales Research and Technology.