InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

QDSP6 V4: Qualcomm Gives Customers and Developers Programming Access to its DSP Core

"There's been at least one DSP core in every chip that Qualcomm's ever made." Qualcomm senior director of product management Rick Maule used this statement as his lead-in to an explanation of the latest-generation QDSP6 architecture, specifically where it fits in the company lengthy DSP development heritage. QDSP6, if you haven't already figured out, refers to Qualcomm's sixth-generation DSP core architecture and is also commonly referred to by its "Hexagon" marketing moniker. The sixth- Read more...

MIPS' Aptiv: DSP Capabilities Become Pervasive

Last month's edition of InsideDSP discussed MIPS' recent three-core Aptiv product family announcement and provided detailed information on the high-end proAptiv offering. This follow-up article will cover the mid-range interAptiv and entry-level microAptiv cores. As with proAptiv, ARM is clearly in MIPS' gunsights with both of these new architectures. interAptiv MIPS' interAptiv core, which like proAptiv will be available by early next quarter, is intended to compete with the ARM Cortex- Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Slower is Better!

When people talk about processor benchmarks, the conversation usually ends up being all about speed. Other metrics, such as energy efficiency, are often given less attention or are completely overlooked. The unspoken assumption driving these conversations is that a faster processor is better. For most embedded signal processing applications, this assumption doesn't make sense. These applications usually have fixed processing requirements. Typically, the goal is to meet those requirements Read more...

Case Study: Maximizing DSP Software Performance on ARM Processors

A decade ago, ARM processors were mainly found in cell phones, disk drives, and few other specialized applications. These days, they seem to be everywhere, from microcontrollers to tablet PCs. During this same time period, digital signal processing (DSP) tasks such as multimedia and communications functions have also become increasingly common in a wide range of systems. Given these two trends, it's no surprise that there's been a big uptick in products using ARM processors to implement digital Read more...

Ivy Bridge: Intel's CPUs Gain a Generational Lithography Edge

Note: the earlier-published (and reversed) 'tick' and 'tock' descriptions have been corrected. Jerry Sanders, AMD's brash former CEO, once opined, "Real men have fabs. These fabless guys are nobodies, just boys." In recent times, however, Sanders' comments seemed increasingly antiquated, with various foundries (most notably mighty TSMC) serving the fabrication needs of an increasing number and variety of semiconductor device suppliers. A notable number of those suppliers had historically Read more...

MIPS' Aptiv: Will New Core Families Make the Company More Competitive?

Processor core provider MIPS Technologies has seemingly fallen on hard times in recent years. Consider, for example, a report published by the Linley Group just last week that indicated chief competitor ARM supplied CPU cores used in 78% of the estimated 10 billion CPU cores in SoCs shipped last year. ARM's estimated per-core license price was 4.6 cents, versus 7 cents for MIPS. However, with MIPS licensees shipping only 665 million MIPS cores (6% of the market, in third place, behind Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Is the Long Tail Getting Longer for Chip Suppliers?

The phrase "the long tail" has come into prominence in the past few years to convey the concept that in some markets, a large number of niche products, each sold in low volume, can create a larger aggregate opportunity than that represented by a small number of blockbuster high-volume products. In the retail world, the long tail has become larger - and consequently has grown as a business opportunity - as the costs of maintaining inventory and delivering products has fallen. To quote from Read more...

Case Study: BDTI Breakthrough Delivers Sound Savings

Lossy audio compression first came to the forefront with the release of the MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer III) format in 1993, followed shortly by MP3 support in PC-based software such as Winamp and in portable audio players. (The emergence of various file-swapping sites and services didn't hurt matters, either). MP3's ascendance was preceded by many years of academic and industry R&D, and the pace of audio compression technology development has greatly accelerated since then. Nowadays, dozens if Read more...

Analog Devices' Latest Blackfin Proliferations Get Embedded Vision Religion

It's a safe bet that when a chip company devotes precious development time and manpower, not to mention silicon area, to a specialized function, that company feels confident that it's going to get a notably positive return on its investment. Take Intel, for example, which embeds a video processing block called Quick Sync in its Sandy Bridge and successor Ivy Bridge processors, in striving to maximize performance and minimize power consumption versus host CPU- or integrated GPU-based video Read more...

CEVA's TeakLite-4: Audio Once Again Comes to the Fore

"If it's not broken, don't fix it." That well-known maxim seemed for many years to encapsulate CEVA's approach to audio DSP cores, given that the company's third-generation offering in this particular application space (and first-generation 32-bit core), the TeakLite-III, dates from 2007. However, after both fortifying its foundation communications DSP offerings ("CEVA's XC4000 DSP Core: The Communications Focus Expands Even More") and moving into the emerging embedded vision space ("The CEVA Read more...