Processors

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...

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...

New Freescale DSP Core Benchmarked By BDTI, Debuts In Macrocell Base Station SoC

After some five years of architecture definition work and several years of development, Freescale's new StarCore SC3900 DSP core will see its first silicon implementation next quarter in the QorIQ Qonverge B4860 processor for macrocell base station designs, unveiled last month at the Mobile World Congress conference. As mentioned last August in InsideDSP (see "Next-Generation Power Architecture-Based SoCs Embrace Advanced Lithography, Core Virtualization, SIMD Instruction Set"), Freescale Read more...

Medfield: Will Intel's Long-Standing x86-in-Smartphone Aspirations Finally be Fulfilled?

Intel has been striving to shoehorn the x86 CPU architecture into handheld communications and computing devices ever since the company began publicly discussing the Atom architecture in late 2007. First- and second-generation Atom-based CPUs and associated core logic chipsets found predominant success in netbooks. But Intel also targeted low-voltage and reduced-clock-speed variants (in some cases also swapping out internally developed graphics accelerators for PowerVR cores licensed from Read more...

Picochip and Mindspeed: Former Competitors Unite to Address Wireless Spectrum Needs

The dearth of available wireless spectrum throughout the world, notably in the United States, is one of technology's hottest topics. It's driving network management policies such as bandwidth throttling, data usage caps, and blocks of particular ports, protocols and services, any or all of which (depending on which side of the debate you're on) are overdue and necessary, or overly heavy-handed and fiscally motivated. It's prompting the FCC to prod terrestrial television broadcasters into Read more...