Looking beyond today’s established high-volume applications, processor and SoC vendors often seek growth in promising emerging applications. In entering any new market, vendors face two key challenges. First, they must ensure that their product is competitive; and second, they must convince prospective customers of their product’s advantages. In emerging markets these challenges are more severe due to a lack of well understood application requirements and established benchmarks. In addition, it is often difficult to obtain reliable information about competing products.
BDTI recently helped a top-10 semiconductor manufacturer evaluate its design for a new, massively parallel processor targeting an emerging video application. While confident in his team’s processor design skills, the design manager was keenly aware of the risks associated with developing a new processor for a new market, and took a disciplined approach to reducing risk through careful benchmarking.
After studying the target application in detail, BDTI constructed a custom benchmark. The benchmark captured the essence of the application workload, while being simple enough to enable quick evaluation of processors. BDTI then used the benchmark to evaluate the performance of a key competing product while the vendor’s engineers used the benchmark to evaluate the performance of their initial design. Comparing the results enabled the chip company to get an early reading on how its design would compare to today’s competitors, and to project how it might stack up against future competitors.
The entire project was completed in a couple of months—early enough to enable the designers to consider changes in the processor design—and also served to build the vendor’s confidence in its ongoing investment in the new product.
BDTI’s custom benchmarking services enable processor, system, and system-on-chip companies to quickly make confident design and business decisions, while reducing the benchmarking effort required of their in-house engineering resources. BDTI has an outstanding track record of completing projects quickly and producing relevant and trustworthy results, enabled by the company’s deep expertise in processors and benchmarking.
Whether designing a new processor, selecting a processor for a new product, or making system architecture decisions, BDTI is in a unique position to help you evaluate processors for your digital signal processing applications. To learn more about BDTI’s products and services, please contact Jeremy Giddings at BDTI (giddings@BDTI.com).
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