Developing a new signal processing engine is expensive and risky, particularly for a small start-up or for an established company moving into an unfamiliar market. There are good reasons to take that risk: signal processing has become ubiquitous in a wide range of application areas, and offers the potential for high revenues. The flip side is that the market is already densely populated with all kinds of signal processing engines: single-core chips, multi-core chips, massively parallel processors, DSP-enhanced FPGAs, SoCs, etc. Depending on the specific target market, a new processor may find itself going head-to-head with some or all of these classes of competitor.
If you're a processor vendor, understanding how your products fit into the competitive landscape and determining their key strengths and weaknesses is essential to success. You need to know which processors are likely to be your toughest competitors, and how your processor stacks up.
Typically processor vendors do their own competitive analysis as part of their design process, and then revisit the competitive landscape later on, during their marketing effort. These internal analyses are essential, but they have their limitations. Not all companies have sufficient (or appropriate) in-house resources to conduct a thorough competitive analysis; for example, companies may lack the breadth of market perspective needed to identify competitors from other processor classes. Furthermore, all companies have their own biases, which can subtly affect the outcome of the comparisons. For these reasons, an independent and knowledgeable third party is a valuable resource for performing comprehensive competitive analyses.
BDTI was recently contacted by a small start-up processor company that had developed a novel massively parallel processor architecture. The company wanted to focus on one or two specific markets, but was unsure where it would have the best chances for success. The company needed to understand where its processor fit into the competitive landscape, and asked BDTI for help.
BDTI worked with the company to define evaluation criteria in the areas of performance, development effort, risk, and flexibility. The evaluation criteria were chosen to provide a holistic picture of the processor's competitive strengths and weaknesses, not simply to determine whether the processor was faster than its competitors. In analyzing its performance, for example, BDTI considered not only raw speed, but also I/O, cost-effectiveness, power efficiency, and memory requirements. The assessment of flexibility included analysis of the suitability of the processor for a wide range of applications, the processor's scalability, and its ability to adapt to new system requirements.
Leveraging its extensive background in processor analysis and benchmarking, BDTI identified four classes of processing engine with which the new architecture was likely to compete, and chose a specific chip within each category for comparison. BDTI then used its evaluation criteria to compare each of the competitors to the chip under consideration. BDTI presented the processor company with a detailed report, including side-by-side comparisons with competitors and a full analysis of the processor's relative strengths and weaknesses. The company was able to use this information to identify potential target markets with a clearer understanding of how its processor compared to key competitors.
To learn how BDTI can help you perform an insightful, accurate, and independent competitive analysis—and find the best market opportunities for your processing engine—contact Jeremy Giddings at +1 (925) 954 1411 or giddings@BDTI.com.
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