Low-Power

NVIDIA's Jetson TK1 Evaluation Board Gets Embedded Vision

At NVIDIA's GTC (the yearly GPU Technology Conference) in March, the company trumpeted its intentions to broadly supply the embedded market with Tegra SoCs and associated hardware and software development tools. As a specific example of this overarching strategy, NVIDIA unveiled a small form factor development kit called "Jetson TKI" (Figure 1), based on the ARM Cortex-A15-based "Logan" Tegra K1 application processor introduced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (see sidebar "A Series Read more...

AMD's Kaveri: Will GPGPU Finally Become a Mainstream Reality?

Back in October 2011, InsideDSP covered both recently introduced and pending CPU-plus-GPU products from AMD, along with the cores that they were based on. At the time, AMD referred to CPU-plus-GPU integration as "Fusion"; the company has subsequently renamed such products as APUs (Accelerated Processing Units). And back then, AMD was actively selling two APU lines; "Ontario" (along with the higher-power "Zacate" variant), based on the mainstream "Bobcat" CPU core, and the higher-end "Llano", Read more...

SigmaDSP: Analog Devices Upgrades the Product Line Significantly

Those of you familiar with Analog Devices' longstanding presence in the DSP market, via the company's Blackfin, SHARC and TigerSHARC product lines, can be forgiven for assuming that SigmaDSP is yet another family of general-purpose DSPs (Figure 1). Figure 1. SigmaDSP is an audio-focused entry-level family offering in Analog Devices' digital signal processing product portfolio. SigmaDSP does implement audio-centric digital signal processing functions, which explains the "DSP" in the name. Read more...

Imagination Technologies and Embedded Vision: The Processing Core Candidate List Gains a Notable Addition

Investment in a particular technology segment, not only by small startups but also by established suppliers, tends to be a dependable indication that the application has large business potential and lengthy staying power. Consider embedded vision, the use of computer vision techniques to extract meaning from visual inputs in embedded systems, mobile devices, PCs and the cloud. BDTI, accurately predicting that embedded vision would rapidly become an important market, founded the Embedded Vision Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—The Rise of "Always Aware" Devices

Smartphone application processor chips incorporate numerous processor cores, typically including multiple CPU cores, GPUs, DSPs, video processors, and image signal processors. Considering all the processing power available in these chips, why does Motorola's recently introduced Moto X smartphone use a stand-alone DSP processor chip? And why would Motorola use a DSP based on a 10-year-old architecture? The answer is that the Moto X uses this low-power DSP chip to provide "always-on" voice Read more...

Vision-Based Advanced Driver Assistance: TI Hopes You'll Give Its Latest SoCs a Chance

Embedded vision, the use of computer vision techniques to extract meaning from visual inputs in embedded systems, mobile devices, PCs and the cloud, is rapidly becoming a significant adopter of digital signal processing technology and techniques. This fact is likely already well known to those of you familiar with the Embedded Vision Alliance, which BDTI founded more than two years ago. If you've visited the Alliance website, you're probably already aware from the content published there that Read more...

ARM's 2015 Mid-Range Platform Prep: A 32-Bit Next-Step

It will likely be news to none of you that the smartphone and tablet market has been on a steep ramp in recent years, and is expected to continue its aggressive growth for the foreseeable future (Figure 1): Figure 1. ARM forecasts continued vigorous growth for smartphones and tablets over the next few years, and requires a mid-range successor to the venerable Cortex-A9 to both continue to address customers' requirements and to fend off competitive challenges from Intel's Atom and other Read more...

Altera's Next-Generation FPGAs: Advanced Process Lithographies Lead to Performance, Power Consumption Efficiencies

Intel is widely regarded as being not only the world's largest semiconductor supplier, but also a leading-edge manufacturing process developer and implementer. While foundries such as TSMC are still finalizing their 20 nm processes, for example, Intel has been shipping 22 nm-based production ICs ("Ivy Bridge" CPUs) since May of last year; the company had previously showcased its first 22 nm test wafer at the September 2009 Intel Developer Forum. Intel similarly achieved a several-year Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Smartphone Benchmarks: Caveat Emptor

Smartphones have become the most important application for high-performance, energy-efficient processors (see "ARM's 2015 Mid-Range Platform Prep: A 32-Bit Next-Step" in this month's edition of InsideDSP). That's because smartphones are a huge and growing business, and processors make a big difference in how smartphones perform – and how long their batteries last. As a result, interest has been growing in smartphone processor performance, and there's been quite a bit of benchmarking activity. Read more...

Qualcomm's QDSP6 v5: Benchmarking Results Confirm That Floating-Point Support Has Arrived

Toward the end of an article published in the February 2013 edition of InsideDSP, analyzing BDTI's published benchmark results of Qualcomm's QDSP6 (aka "Hexagon") v4 DSP core, you'll find the following prescient quote: Qualcomm is, of course, not done innovating with Hexagon. The June 2012 InsideDSP article uncovered evidence of an upcoming QDSP6 v5, which the company officially unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show last month within its newest Snapdragon 800 Series SoCs. QDSP V5 expands Read more...