This tutorial responds to the rapidly increasing use of cores in general and of processor cores in particular for implementing systems-on-a-chip. In the first part of this text, we will provide a brief introduction to various cores. Applications can be found in most segments of the embedded systems market. These applications demand for extreme efficiency, and in particular for efficient processor architectures and for efficient embedded software. In the second part of this text, we will show that current compilers do not provide the required efficiency and we will give an overview over new compiler optimization techniques, which aim at making assembly language programming for embedded software obsolete. These new techniques take advantage of the special characteristics of embedded software and embedded architectures. Due to efficiency considerations, processor architectures optimized for application domains or even for particular applications are of interest. This results in a large number of architectures and instruction sets, leading to the requirement for retargeting compilers to those numerous architectures. In the final section of the tutorial, we will present techniques for retargeting compilers to new architectures easily. We will show, how compilers can be generated from descriptions of processors. One of the approaches closes the gap which so far existed between electronic CAD and compiler generation.