Communication

3DLabs Aims Massively Parallel Chips at Portable Multimedia

When people talk about massively parallel, multicore chips, they’re usually talking about chips for high-performance line-powered applications, like WiMAX base stations or desktop video processing.  But 3DLabs is headed in a different direction.  The fabless chip company offers a massively parallel media processor, the DMS-02, which the company says is a perfect fit for portable multimedia devices with demanding video and audio processing requirements—such as high-end cellular handsets and Read more...

Hantro 8190 Will Bring YouTube to Cell Phones

A few months ago, video codec vendor On2 announced its acquisition of Hantro, a company that offers licensable video codec accelerators and software.  At the Mobile World Congress in February, On2 unveiled the first offspring from the marriage—the Hantro 8190 licensable silicon IP core. The 8190 is a video decoder core that’s intended for use in chips targeting mobile handsets, and supports the Flash video format (FLV) used by YouTube and Facebook.  So if you get an 8190-equipped cell phone 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...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—As Signal Processing Workloads Evolve, So Must Processors

Historically, DSP processors have been the default choice for signal processing applications because they could efficiently process classical signal processing functions like FIR filters and FFTs. But those capabilities aren’t enough any more. Signal processing applications still include demanding real-time filtering and frequency transforms, but these algorithms are increasingly combined with processing that is fundamentally different. For example, algebraic signal processing computations Read more...

Stretch Announces Second-generation Software Configurable Processor

On March 5, Stretch, Inc. announced its second-generation software configurable processor family, the S6000, and two initial chips. With this offering—its first since the appointment last year of a new CEO—Stretch is mainly targeting video surveillance, video broadcast, and WiMAX basestation applications. The S6000, like the previous-generation S5000 family, is a RISC processor which incorporates a reconfigurable compute fabric within its datapath. The fabric (which Stretch calls ISEF) Read more...

Texas Instruments Announces Multi-core Baseband Processor

In December Texas Instruments announced the TCI6487 multi-core baseband processor. The device will be manufactured in a 65 nm process and is intended mainly for GSM, TD-SCDMA and WiMAX basestation applications. The TCI6487 features three TMS320C64x+ DSP cores running at 1 GHz. In comparison, its predecessor, the TCI6482, featured a single 1 GHz ‘64x+ core. TI has also added an antenna interface supporting OBSAI and CPRI protocols. DSP cores in the TCI6487 communicate with each other and Read more...

PicoChip: Defying the Odds

Editor’s Note: The past year or so has brought a wave of parallel-processor start-ups pursuing digital signal processing applications.  But what about the previous wave?  In the late 1990s and into 2001, a large number of start-ups emerged with unique processor architectures targeting applications like wireless infrastructure.  The vast majority of these, such as Chameleon, Morphics, and Quicksilver, are long gone.  PicoChip, founded in 2000, is an interesting exception.  In this article, Read more...

Special Preview: The Evolving Role of FPGAs in DSP Applications

Editor’s Note: This article contains selected highlights from BDTI’s new report, FPGAs for DSP, Second Edition. In recent years, FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) have become increasingly attractive as signal processing engines, sometimes used alone and sometimes in conjunction with a processor chip. The largest FPGA vendors, Altera and Xilinx, have invested heavily in developing DSP-oriented chips and development tools. BDTI has just completed an in-depth study of these DSP-oriented Read more...

Sandbridge Launches Power-Optimized Programmable Handset Processor

Today fabless chip start-up Sandbridge announced its new SB3011 chip, a low-power derivative of the SB3010 chip announced in July 2005.  The chip is fully programmable and is aimed at replacing baseband and application processors in cellular handsets.  Sandbridge will face stiff competition from dominant players such as TI and Qualcomm that have close relationships with handset manufacturers, but the company remains optimistic; the company recently received $15.4 million in Series B funding Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Multi-Core Math =

When does 1 GHz + 1 GHz  + 1 GHz  + 1 GHz not necessarily equal 4 GHz?  When you’re calculating the performance potential of a multi-core chip.  Freescale recently introduced a new DSP chip, the MSC8144, that contains four 1 GHz SC3400 processor cores. Freescale characterizes the new chip as being “performance-equivalent” to one 4 GHz core. But is it really?  As usual, the answer is, “It depends.”  It depends on what kind of application you’re running, how you map the application onto the Read more...