Chris Rowen, chief technology officer at chip and IP vendor Tensilica Inc., said his company tackles this clashing of cultures by work with both sides to understand what pressures they are under—reliability and flexibility on the hardware side, and power efficiency and cost on the software side.

Ultimately, Rowen said, program managers and system designers or whoever is responsible for the combination hardware and software deliverable is the "ultimate arbitrator in how you bring these two together." Rowen added that the emergence of multicore architecture has contributed to the blurring of hardware and software design.

"You can't design the hardware without thinking of the software and you can't design the software without thinking of the hardware," said Marc Serughetti, vice president marketing and business development for system-level EDA vendor CoWare Inc. Serughetti added that doing analysis and system-level design on projects up front saves time and money.

Serughetti suggested that the industry must begin thinking of system design more holistically, not as software or hardware. Even at the university level, there are still programs in hardware engineering and software engineering, with no education around system engineering, he said.

Other panelists suggested that the rise to prominence of the C programming language bore some of the responsibility for the bifurcation of the hardware and software worlds.

"When I used to program, we knew everything about the hardware we were programming for," said Joachim Kunkel, vice president and general manager of Synopsys Inc.'s Solutions group. "That got lost by the time people started to program in the C language."

Kunkel said that over the years performance gains by hardware have masked the problem. He said the time has come when software developers must start understanding the hardware again.

Michael MacNamara, a general manager at Cadence Design Systems Inc., said the engineering community forced C to become a general purpose programming language, something it was not necessarily designed for. What the industry needs is a method for capturing the intent of a user and managing priorities, he said.

Tomas Evensen, chief technology officer at Wind River Systems Inc. said C was a good language for abstraction, but not necessarily for dealing with the massive parallelism that is emerging in computing.

"I don't know if there is a language that will abstract parallelism in all of the different use cases out there," Evensen said. "If there is one, we will come up with it."

Rowan said, "C is not a parallel language, but millions of people know it. So it is a practical one."

Watch the video of the panel discussion below.