Technical Marketing

Case Study—Optimizing Presentations, Products, and Plans

The best way to ensure that a presentation is effective is to test it with a knowledgeable, critical, and responsive audience. A test audience can also help ensure that the content is correct, relevant, and appropriate for the intended audience. Just as important, a test audience can help presenters gauge the clarity, appeal, and impact of their pitch. After all, superb technical content serves no purpose if the audience loses interest a few minutes into the presentation. BDTI analysts can Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Bamboozling with Benchmarks, Part 1

My colleagues and I at BDTI believe very strongly in benchmarks. We’ve been developing and implementing signal processing benchmarks for over a decade, and we know that good benchmarks play an essential role in evaluating processing engines. You can see, then, why we get bent out of shape when benchmarks are used misleadingly. This happens pretty regularly in vendor marketing materials, but we’ve also seen it in training classes and technical articles. Most people don’t set out to use Read more...

Case Study–Benchmarks for Tools, Software Libraries, and More

System developers often rely on processor benchmarks to gauge system performance. However, the processor is just one of many components that determines overall performance. Fully understanding system performance requires careful analysis of many other elements, such as code-generation tools and third-party software libraries. Unfortunately, a host of factors can confound attempts to analyze these components. For example, it is difficult to prevent variations in programmer skill and style from Read more...

Case Study: Optimizing Presentations, Products, and Plans

The best way to ensure that a presentation is effective is to test it with a knowledgeable, critical, and responsive audience. A test audience can also help ensure that the content is correct, relevant, and appropriate for the intended audience. Just as important, a test audience can help presenters gauge the clarity, appeal, and impact of their pitch. After all, superb technical content serves no purpose if the audience loses interest a few minutes into the presentation. BDTI analysts can Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Making Benchmarks Useful

A few weeks ago I participated in a panel discussion on benchmarking. The theme of the panel was how to benchmark multi-threaded and multi-core processors. In my view, this theme highlights a key problem with many benchmark approaches: too many benchmarks are designed to exercise hardware features, rather than to provide information that system developers need. In most embedded applications, system developers care about high-level system attributes such as low cost, long battery life, Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Truth in Advertising

If you are a regular reader of this column, you have probably noticed a recurring theme: signal processing applications are becoming more complicated and more varied—and so is the hardware that runs them. Ten years ago, DSPs used fairly simple architectures, and the architectures of most DSPs were similar to one another. Today, many DSPs use very complex architectures, and there is a remarkable amount of variety among DSP architectures. What's more, DSPs increasingly compete with alternatives Read more...

Case Study: Developing Performance Claims that Customers Trust

Processor vendors hoping to penetrate new signal processing applications face several challenges. Key among them is convincing prospective customers that the processor will perform well in the target application. Customers are often reluctant to accept vendors’ performance projections, particularly if key application software components have not yet been fully implemented. It’s possible to predict application performance based on analysis of benchmark results, but even then, customers are Read more...

Case Study: Optimizing Presentations, Products, and Plans

Top-notch marketing presentations and press briefings are key to convincing prospective customers, partners, editors, and investors that a product is attractive and viable. Effective presentations combine clear, convincing technical information with a compelling marketing message—a difficult combination to achieve. And even accurate, convincing presentations can run into trouble if the presenter isn’t prepared for tough questions. The best way to ensure that a presentation is effective Read more...

Case Study—Checking Out the Competition

Charting a processor roadmap is a difficult task. To set a successful course for a processor family, a processor developer must predict trends in the processor’s target applications as well as developments in competing processor families. The developer must then determine how to evolve its offerings in order to respond to these expected changes. For example, remaining competitive may require a carefully balanced mix of lowering prices, raising clock speeds, and adding architectural features Read more...