Freescale Takes on Texas Instruments with Multi-Core DSP Line

Freescale has announced a new high-performance DSP product line, the MSC825x, incorporating up to six StarCore SC3850 DSP cores at up to 1 GHz.  Unlike other high-performance DSPs introduced by Freescale in recent years—which were aimed almost exclusively at wireless infrastructure applications—the new chips target a range of performance-intensive applications, including medical, aerospace and defense, and test and measurement equipment.  This will put the new chips in direct competition with Texas Instruments’ (TI’s) high-performance multi-core DSPs (the TMS320C647x family, based on the C64x+ architecture).      

The SC3850 core recently achieved the highest fixed-point BDTImark2000™ score of any DSP architecture tested by BDTI to date.  It achieved a BDTImark2000 score of 15,420, compared to the previous record of 13,170 set by Texas Instruments’ 1.2 GHz C64x+ DSP.  The SC3850 uses a 64-bit very long instruction word that supports up to four 32-bit ALU operations or eight 16×16 bit multiplications, as well as two address generation unit operations per cycle.  The SC3850’s high BDTImark2000 performance is primarily due to a shallower pipeline which requires less loop setup and has shorter branch delay penalties than cores with similar numbers of computational units, such as the TI C64x+.

Freescale’s newly announced chips will provide 48 billion multiply-accumulate operations per second (GMACS,) compared to 33.6 GMACS for the TI TMS320C6472.  However, TI has promised chips incorporating four and eight cores at 1.0 to 1.2 GHz, which are expected to sample in the second half of 2010.  TI has said that its new chips will achieve up to 256 GMACS and 128 GFLOPS; if TI can deliver, these chips will clearly raise the bar for programmable DSP performance.

Table 1 compares performance characteristics of high performance multi-core devices from Freescale and TI.

For the past few years Freescale’s DSP group has been pursuing a very narrowly focused market strategy, targeting primarily tier-one wireless base station providers building 3G, LTE and 4G cellular base stations.  With these customers, Freescale was able to leverage its existing relationships selling PowerPC-based PowerQUICC and QorIQ CPUs.  This strategy has apparently yielded fruit, with Freescale claiming over 20 design wins at 8 of the top 10 base station suppliers in 2009.  With the announcement of the new MSC8256 (without baseband specific accelerators), Freescale is sending the message that it now intends to compete head-to-head in the high-performance general-purpose DSP market.