Mobile phones are rapidly and dramatically expanding beyond their historical usage as voice-only communications devices, adding a variety of wireless data-fed text, email, web browsing and other functions, supplementing (and in many cases supplanting) the facilities of dedicated still and video cameras, and serving as portable multimedia playback platforms. But all of these functions consume power, and both users and designers of mobile phones are very concerned about battery life.

As embedded processors and applications become increasingly complex, good benchmarks are more important than ever. System designers need good benchmarks to judge whether a processor will meet the needs of their applications, and to make accurate comparisons among processors. Processor developers need good benchmarks to assess how their processors stack up against the competition, and to prove their processors' capabilities to customers.

But what exactly comprises a good benchmark?

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.

Included in an article on FPGA benchmarking in the September 2011 edition of InsideDSP, BDTI wrote:

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.

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).

In 2011, I spoke with Professor Jitendra Malik, a distinguished computer vision researcher and teacher at U.C. Berkeley. Professor Malik, tongue-in-cheek, remarked that he is frequently frustrated when trying to explain his work to non-technical people. In their minds, his research often sounds like an awful lot of effort just to enable a computer to approach the object-recognition capabilities of a toddler.

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.

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.

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.