Processors

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—What’s the Best Processor for Embedded Vision?

These days, more and more product creators are incorporating computer vision into their designs. At the recent Embedded Vision Summit conference, a majority of the roughly 500 attendees reported that they are currently working on a vision-enabled product, or plan to start a vision-based design within the next year. And, increasingly, these designs target high-volume markets, like the recently announced Amazon Fire smartphone and the collision-prevention systems now being offered in many mid- Read more...

Synopsys' EM5D and EM7D Processor Cores: The ARC Architecture Gains DSP Capabilities

Although the ARC brand has kept a relatively low profile since being acquired by Synopsys in 2009, Synopsys reports that the ARC family of licensable cores are on track to ship more than 1.5 billion units this year. Until recently, ARC's offerings were "vanilla" Harvard architecture CPUs with no DSP-optimized features. That's all changed with the latest EM5D and EM7D (the "D" standing for "DSP"), the first two members of the EM DSP family, which were introduced in late May and are generally Read more...

Lithography, Architecture Evolutions Boost Analog Devices' Mid-Range Blackfin Devices

The April 2012 edition of InsideDSP covered Analog Devices' BF60x family, which as the then-published product roadmap indicated, was the successor to the high end of the BF5xx product range (Figure 1). Figure 1. Analog Devices' new BF70x products fill the "single core Blackfin" next-generation slot on the company's published roadmap two years ago. All four BF60x family members run at clock speeds of up to 500 MHz and integrate a dual Blackfin DSP cores; the BF608 and BF609 additionally embed a Read more...

Case Study: Diverse Assistance Leads To Vision Processing Optimization Success

As computer vision is deployed into a variety of new applications, driven by the emergence of powerful, low-cost, and energy-efficient processors, companies need to find ways to squeeze demanding vision processing algorithms into size-, weight-, power, and cost-constrained systems. Fortunately, BDTI's foundation as a benchmarking services company has, as has been mentioned before, provided its engineers with extensive skills in optimizing software to best exploit processor capabilities. And it' Read more...

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...

Synopsys Acquires Custom-Processor Design Tool Supplier Target Compiler Technologies

Corporate acquisitions occur for many reasons. Sometimes the market is too small to support multiple participants. Sometimes the acquiring company wants to eliminate a competitor, with aspirations of obtaining the acquired company's customers in the process. Sometimes the acquired company's products are deemed superior in some way, or maybe the acquiring company just wants to get access to a "crack" team of employees. And sometimes multiple of these motivations are behind the transaction. The 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...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Practical Portable Parallel Programming?

By now, most people who work with processors—whether in data centers, PCs, mobile devices, or embedded systems—understand that parallel processing is the way to get both high compute performance and good energy efficiency for most applications. And most of these people also realize that programming parallel processors is challenging. There are many different types of parallel processors, including CPUs with single-instruction/multiple data capabilities, multi-core CPUs, DSPs, GPUs and FPGAs, 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...