Benchmarks

New AMD CPU Architectures Make Notable Digital Signal Processing Advancements

Last month's announcement by Advanced Micro Devices that its "Bulldozer"-based Opteron microprocessors for servers had begun shipping to customers for revenue, followed by last week's release of first public benchmarks for Bulldozer-based AMD FX CPUs, capped off a year-long series of new CPU microarchitectures and devices for the company. Notably, the microarchitectures represent the first fresh offerings from AMD since 2007's K10 microarchitecture, which first appeared in "Barcelona" CPUs Read more...

BDTI Study Validates FPGA Floating-Point Digital Signal Processing Viability, Altera Design Toolset Capabilities

In design situations where optimum performance and/or power consumption is required, implementing digital signal processing functions in dedicated hardware versus software becomes an attractive proposition. A FPGA is a particularly compelling silicon platform for realizing this aspiration, because it conceptually combines the inherent hardware attributes of an ASIC with the flexibility and time-to-market advantages of the software alternative running on a CPU, GPU or DSP. As such, FPGAs are Read more...

Embedded Vision Alliance Forms to Catalyze Practical Applications of Computer Vision

A new industry association, the Embedded Vision Alliance, is being formed to help embedded system designers harness computer vision in their products.  BDTI, which has initiated the partnership, believes that computer vision—extracting meaning from images and video—is poised to proliferate into a wide range of applications in the next few years. The success of the Microsoft Kinect—which has become the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history, selling 10 million units in its first Read more...

Case Study: Chip Design Costs Make Processor Core Choice Paramount

As we’ve all heard, the cost of creating a custom chip has skyrocketed. Still, there are applications where a custom chip is justified—usually by specialized, demanding technical requirements. Today, custom chips often incorporate multiple processor cores.  The choice of a licensable processor core is among the first decisions that a design team makes, and may be the decision that they live with the longest:  the hassles of porting software from one processor architecture to another mean that Read more...

Freescale Launches 4G Baseband SoC

The march toward 4G cellular networks is accelerating. For example, Verizon just lit up its LTE network in 38 U.S. cities. But widespread deployment will require lower-cost base stations.  Freescale is aiming to enable lower-cost base stations with its new baseband SoCs, introduced last month on the heels of Texas Instrument’s latest 4G offering. The new Freescale SoCs are based on Freescale’s SC3850 StarCore DSP core that, at 1.2 GHz has just achieved the top fixed-point score on the BDTI Read more...

TI Supports Floating-Point in New High-Performance DSPs

In early 2010, Texas Instruments (TI) announced a new multi-core DSP SoC architecture. This month, TI announced the first chips based on this architecture. This latest announcement includes details of TI’s new TMS320C66x (C66x) DSP processor core, which offers both state-of-the-art fixed-point performance and strong floating-point support. The multi-core architecture and C66x core underlie a family of new general-purpose DSPs, as well as two chips for wireless infrastructure applications, one Read more...

CEVA Launches Two New DSP Cores with Support for Porting TI Software

DSP processor core licensor CEVA has added to its portfolio with the new CEVA-X1643 and CEVA-XC323 DSP cores. The cores are the next-generation successors to the CEVA-X1641 and CEVA-XC321, respectively. The new cores roughly double the clock frequency of the prior offerings to 1 GHz and are targeted for 40 nm implementation.  Both cores rely on a VLIW architecture combined with SIMD capabilities, and the XC323 adds a vector computation unit. The X1643 targets a broad range of applications Read more...

Case Study: Showing a Processor’s Full Potential with Optimized Benchmarks

In the last issue of Inside DSP, we explained why good benchmarks are important both for processor users and for processor designers.  We also discussed why optimized benchmarks are critical when assessing a processor’s performance for digital signal processing tasks.  Given that optimized benchmarks are required, if you’re a processor vendor, how do you ensure that your benchmark implementations are fully optimized, and therefore show your processor’s full potential?  Optimizing digital Read more...

Case Study: Choosing the Right Benchmarks for the Job

As embedded processors and applications become increasingly complex, good benchmarks are more important than ever.  System designers need good benchmarks to judge whether a processor will meet the needs of their applications, and to make accurate comparisons among processors.  Processor developers need good benchmarks to assess how their processors stack up against the competition—and to prove their processors’ capabilities to customers. But what exactly comprises a good benchmark? One Read more...

Case Study: Benchmarking PowerPoint Processors

Processor designers know that a cycle-accurate simulator can be used to benchmark a processor that has not yet been fabricated. But many designers don’t realize that it’s also possible to benchmark an idea for a processor, a processor that may exist only in PowerPoint slides—and that there are good reasons for doing so. As BDTI’s president Jeff Bier has written in his column, BDTI has seen a number of cases in which a processor vendor used BDTI’s benchmarks on its fully-designed processor, Read more...