Benchmarks

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Don’t Ban Benchmarks

I recently read a license agreement for a suite of software development tools and discovered some interesting fine print: the agreement prohibits licensees from benchmarking the tools. Well, it doesn’t prohibit benchmarking per se, but it prohibits disclosure of any results. Although my company, BDTI, is a benchmarking company (and we benchmark tools as well as processors), we weren’t planning on benchmarking these particular tools. We bought them for use on a software development project Read more...

Case Study—Improving Chip Architectures with Specialized Talent

In an ideal world, chip designers would evaluate their new designs on real applications. But who’s got the time to implement an entire cellular baseband or video codec just to see if their proposed design is efficient? That’s the reason chip designers use benchmarks. But benchmarking is not just about selecting the right algorithms. It’s also about careful implementation—careful crafting of software that is appropriately optimized for the target architecture. As a result, sound benchmarking Read more...

BDTI Releases Benchmark Results for Tilera’s TILE64 Multicore Processor

BDTI has released independent benchmark results for Tilera’s massively parallel TILE64 processor on the BDTI Communications Benchmark (OFDM)™. The TILE64 chip incorporates 64 processor cores connected to each other in a mesh configuration. The cores operate at 866 MHz and are fairly simple, three-issue VLIW machines that support limited SIMD operations, such as SIMD adds and subtracts (but not SIMD multiplies).  Tilera expects engineers to program the chip using C/C++ along with intrinsics to Read more...

Case Study: Maximize Press Coverage of Your Product

Unless you’re announcing a laptop that runs off body heat or similar epochal breakthrough, it’s hard for technology companies to get media attention.  And when a product does get editorial coverage, it’s even harder to distinguish what’s true from the infomercials.  With every announcement claiming “better,” “new,” and “breakthrough,” what will grab legitimate attention?  One ingredient of a successful announcement, PR professionals agree, is compelling data. In 2007, an early-stage chip Read more...

Case Study: “Your Mileage May Vary:” Creating Reliable Comparisons of IP Cores

An attractive attribute of licensable processor cores is the flexibility chip designers have to adapt these cores to their chosen fabrication process, cell library, tool flow, logic synthesis goals and other conditions.  In other words, chip designers can tune the core to the needs of a particular application and to their preferred chip design methodology.  An unfortunate side effect of this flexibility is that it can be extremely difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons between Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Risky Business

If you were getting ready to buy a new high-end camcorder or a new car, chances are you’d spend some time reading independent reviews. Maybe you’d pick up a copy of Consumer Reports or Road and Track. Perhaps you’d scan Amazon.com for user evaluations.  Whatever. The point is, you probably wouldn’t just make your choice based on the vendor’s marketing claims, right?   Yet that’s exactly what some design engineers do when they choose a processing engine. My colleagues at BDTI and I were Read more...

Case Study: Change or Be Changed: Good Business Decisions Require Good Information

The electronics industry has long been a dynamic one, but never as dynamic as it is today. Private equity investors now own some of the largest semiconductor companies and are pushing for improved efficiencies. Many, if not most, of the largest chip companies are making significant adjustments in their strategies. And, as usual, changes in technology—often driven by innovative start-ups—threaten to disrupt the status quo. In this dynamic environment, industry executives and investors are Read more...

Case Study—BDTI Benchmarks Help Vendors Win New Customers

Smaller fabless chip vendors face an uphill battle: to beat out larger rivals, they must attract the attention of potential customers, prove the advantages of their products, and demonstrate that they will be reliable, long-term partners.  One such company recently used BDTI Benchmarks to accomplish all three of these objectives. This fabless chip vendor sells chips for wireless infrastructure applications.  In these applications, the obstacles for small companies are more challenging than Read more...

Evaluating the DSP Capabilities of the Cortex-R4

In 2004, ARM announced its newest generation of licensable cores, called the “Cortex” family.  Cortex cores span a wide range of performance levels, with Cortex M-series cores at the low end, Cortex R-series cores providing mid-range performance, and the Cortex A-series applications processors offering the highest performance.  The first Cortex core to be announced was the Cortex-M3, and since then ARM has announced several others, including the Cortex-A8 and A9, the Cortex-M1, and the Cortex- Read more...

BDTI Releases Benchmark Results for Massively Parallel picoChip PC102

BDTI has released the first independent benchmark results comparing the performance of picoChip’s massively parallel PC102 chip to that of high-performance DSP processors and FPGAs. picoChip is a fabless semiconductor company that sells multi-core chips for wireless infrastructure applications, such as WiMax base stations. The PC102 is based on picoChip’s multiple-instruction, multiple-data (MIMD) architecture and contains 308 heterogeneous processor cores and 14 co-processors, all of which Read more...