Yesterday Analog Devices announced the latest members of its SHARC family of floating-point DSPs, the ADSP-21367 and ADSP-21368. The '21367 targets high-end consumer audio applications such as home theater systems, and the '21368 targets professional audio applications such as mixing consoles. The '21367 and '21368 are identical in most respects. Both will operate at 400 MHz; both will include 256 Kbytes of RAM and 768 Kbytes of ROM; and both will offer a variety of audio-specific peripherals. On the '21367, the ROM is pre-programmed with audio decoding and post-processing algorithms; the '21368 ROM is reserved for customer code. The parts also differ in that only the '21368 will offer multi-processor support.
The '21367 and '21368 are expected to begin sampling in the first quarter of 2005. When they arrive, these new parts will make the SHARC family significantly faster than its main competitor, the Texas Instruments TMS320C67x. The '21367 and '21368 are expected to achieve a BDTIsimMark2000 score of 2050 at 400 MHz, compared to a BDTImark2000 score of 1470 for the 300 MHz 'C6713. (The BDTIsimMark2000 and BDTImark2000 are summary measures of signal processing speed. For more information and scores, see http://www.BDTI.com/Services/Benchmarks/DKB.) The new SHARC parts will also be significantly faster than existing SHARC family members, which top out at 333 MHz.
Although the new SHARC parts will be faster than their main competitors, the prices for these parts are modest: the '21367 and '21368 will be priced at $29.95 and $34.95, respectively, in 10,000-unit quantities. In comparison, the 300 MHz 'C6713 is priced at $38.75 in 10,000-unit quantities. The prices for the '21367 and '21368 are particularly notable considering the large memories included on these chips. For example, the 'C6713 offers about the same amount of on-chip RAM as the '21367 and '21368, but the 'C6713 does not include any on-chip ROM.
Analog Devices has aggressively expanded it SHARC family recently, announcing ten new parts in the last eleven months. It will be interesting to see how its competitors respond to this sudden growth in the SHARC family.
Add new comment