In February Analog Devices announced that the 250 MHz TigerSHARC had at long last reached full production. Analog Devices says this processor is particularly suitable for 3G cellular base stations; TigerSHARC also targets high-performance fixed- and floating-point defense, medical, and video applications.
At its announcement in October 1998, TigerSHARC’s projected performance was head and shoulders above that of the existing competition. For example, a 250 MHz TigerSHARC can perform up to 2.0 billion 16-bit fixed-point or 500 million 32-bit floating-point multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations per second. The fastest DSPs available at that time, Texas Instruments’ 200 MHz ’C6201 and 167 MHz ’C6701, could muster only 400 million fixed-point and 334 million floating-point MACs per second, respectively.
Today, however, TigerSHARC faces a much more formidable pool of competitors, particularly considering its announced price of $196. In comparison, Texas Instruments’ 600 MHz ’C6414 can perform 2.4 billion fixed-point MACs per second at the far lower price of $111. The TigerSHARC’s price is in the same league as that of a 933 MHz Motorola MPC7445; this PowerPC processor can perform 1.87 billion floating-point MACs per second and is priced at $205. (All prices are for orders of 10,000 units.)
Although production delays have eliminated its performance lead, TigerSHARC still has some unusual advantages. Primary among these advantages is TigerSHARC’s support for a broad range of data types, including 8-, 16-, and 32-bit fixed-point data and 32-bit floating-point data; similar data-type agility is also found in AltiVec-enhanced PowerPCs, but is rare among DSPs and embedded general-purpose processors. TigerSHARC also has a remarkably high internal memory bandwidth of 4 billion 16-bit words per second. The challenge for Analog Devices is to convince the market that these and other advantages are sufficient to differentiate TigerSHARC from the growing ranks of high-performance competitors.
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