Processors

Case Study: Digital Signal Processing Library Development Enables Effective Processor Deployments

As applications become more complex, and processors become more powerful, system developers increasingly rely on off-the-shelf software components to enable rapid and efficient application development. This is particularly true in digital signal processing, where application developers expect to have access to libraries of optimized building-block functions to speed their work. A leading SoC developer recently contracted BDTI to assist it in developing a comprehensive library of software Read more...

Tensilica's (Now Cadence's) Xtensa 10: Process Capabilities, Application Needs Drive Core Evolution Trends

Instruction set flexibility can go a long way toward extending the usable life of a processor architecture. Sooner or later, however, instruction set enhancements to an existing architecture foundation run out of steam, and a more fundamental evolution is necessary. This explains why Cadence Fellow (and former Tensilica co-founder and CTO...Cadence announced in March that it was acquiring Tensilica) Chris Rowen took to the stage in mid-October to unveil the company's latest tenth-generation Read more...

CEVA's XC-4500 DSP: Symmetric Multi-Processing Capabilities Are Now Key

The title of the press release for CEVA's latest XC-4500 communications DSP core, introduced in mid-October, claims that it's the "World's First Vector Floating-Point DSP for Wireless Infrastructure Solutions." Those of you with good memories might be confused at this point, in thinking back to InsideDSP's February 2012 coverage of CEVA's prior-generation XC-4000 family. To clarify, although the earlier XC-4400 and XC-4410 also offered IEEE 754-compliant floating-point support, it was not 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...

Imperfect Processing: A Functionally Feasible (and Fiscally Attractive) Option, Says Singular Computing

Conventional wisdom dictates that an arithmetic circuit that generates inexact results is faulty. But Joe Bates, founder and president of Singular Computing, thinks that conventional wisdom may be mistaken, at least for certain classes of applications. Bates, in his own words, has spent roughly half his professional life in academia and the other half involved with various startups. Reflective of the former focus, he is also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and has held 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...