Video

Analog Devices Grows Blackfin Family with 4 New Processors

This week, Analog Devices introduced four new members of its Blackfin processor family: the ADSP-BF549, ‘BF548, ‘BF544, and ‘BF542.  These new devices will operate at clock speeds of up to 600 MHz and are intended mainly for automotive applications that incorporate signal processing, such as digital broadcast radio receivers, navigation systems, and rear-seat entertainment equipment.  The new devices feature more on-chip memory than most Blackfin devices (only the high-performance ‘BF535 Read more...

Texas Instruments Announces DaVinci Family Extensions

Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) this week announced four new “DaVinci”-branded processors: the TMS320DM6437, TMS320DM6435, TMS320DM6433 and TMS320DM6431. Priced at $10-23, the media processors target video applications in the car and the home. (All prices in this article are for 10,000 unit quantities.) The new devices are architecturally similar to the first DaVinci chips, the ‘DM6446 and ‘DM6443. These chips and the new ‘DM643x devices both feature a ‘C64x+ core and varying assortments of Read more...

ARC Unveils Player Subsystem and Partnership With SMIC

On September 9th, silicon intellectual property licensor ARC made two related announcements:  It unveiled a new configurable multimedia player subsystem based on its ARC600 family of cores, and announced a new partnership with Chinese silicon foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC).  Under ARC's agreement with SMIC, ARC licensees that design chips in China and use SMIC for fabrication will pay no up-front licensing fees, paying royalties only when their chips start Read more...

Ambric Discloses Massively Parallel Architecture

On August 21st fabless semiconductor startup Ambric unveiled its massively parallel processor architecture. Ambric joins a host of start-ups pursuing a similar idea: chaining together a large number of simple RISC-like processor cores in ways intended to avoid inter-processor communication bottlenecks and programming problems found in traditional multiprocessor systems. In the Ambric architecture, individual processors can run at different clock speeds, and processors operate asynchronously Read more...

Case Study: Algorithm IP Companies Focus on the Algorithm

Companies that focus on DSP algorithm development are often at the cutting edge, delivering the ideas that drive new technologies.  For example, innovative compression, communications, and recognition algorithms have enabled numerous new products in recent years.  Unfortunately, it takes more than a great algorithm to be successful.  An algorithm is only as good as its implementation.  Without a well optimized implementation, even the best algorithm risks extinction in the marketplace. To 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...

Creating Embedded-Friendly Reference Code

Say you’ve just developed a new digital signal processing algorithm—a new audio or video codec, for example. The algorithm is intended to be ported to multiple embedded processors, including general-purpose processors (like the ARM9) and digital signal processors (like the Texas Instruments TMS320C55x). Porting an algorithm to an embedded processor is a lot of work, but many of the steps involved are the same regardless of the target processor. Therefore, it makes sense to create a version of Read more...

TI Launches First “DaVinci” Video Processors

Last week TI unveiled its first “DaVinci”-branded processors, the TMS320DM6443 and the TMS320DM6446. These processors target home entertainment, surveillance, and other video applications. The two chips are similar in many respects. Each chip contains a 300 MHz ARM9E general-purpose processor core, a 600 MHz ‘C64x+ DSP core, and connectivity peripherals such as USB and Ethernet ports. The differences between the chips reflect the fact that the ‘DM6446 targets both video encoding and Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—When Scaling Gets Squirrelly

It’s so tempting. You need to figure out how much processing power you’ll require to implement a particular video compression algorithm, and there, out on the Web, is the data you need—but for a slightly different scenario. Perhaps the data is for a smaller frame size than what you have in mind. Or maybe it’s for a low compressed bit rate, and your application will be using a higher one. You tell yourself, “Well, I don’t have the exact data I need, so I’ll just multiply the data I do have Read more...

ARC Previews Powerful Media Extensions

Last week processor core licensor ARC introduced a multimedia subsystem for its ARC 700 family of configurable cores. This multimedia subsystem extends the ARC 700 CPU with new instructions, a powerful SIMD engine, memory, a DMA controller, and video decoding software. The SIMD engine is the most notable feature of this subsystem. This engine features a 128-bit-wide data path that can perform up to sixteen 8-bit operations, eight 16-bit operations or four 32-bit operations per cycle. In Read more...