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

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?

Qualcomm recently opened up the QDSP6 (aka "Hexagon") DSP core in its Snapdragon SoCs to programming access by its customers and software developer partners. Multimedia applications, for example, can benefit from leveraging QDSP6 processing resources, boosting overall performance, minimizing overall power consumption, and freeing up the CPU to tackle other tasks.

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.

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 positions at MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell.

Lately I've been spending many hours on conference calls: Early morning calls with colleagues in Europe and India, mid-day calls with customers in the U.S., and late evening calls with partners in China. I often find these calls difficult and fatiguing--not because of what people are saying, but because I frequently have trouble understanding what people are saying.

Remember that childhood game where you try to decide which famous person--or which book, or whatever--you'd like to have with you, if you were to be stranded on a desert island?

[Editor's Note: In July, BDTI received a technology update briefing from Samplify, a start-up that has pioneered innovative approaches to, and applications of, data compression in embedded systems. Subsequently, rumors came to our attention suggesting that Samplify's investors are looking to sell the company.

Our team at BDTI includes people based in California, Colorado, Illinois, and Rhode Island. And our customers are all over the world. So, we all spend a lot of time in conference calls...often-frustrating conference calls.

I've been hearing a lot about "wearable tech" for the past year or so, and lately the buzz has intensified. At Qualcomm’s recent developer conference, the chipmaker unveiled its "Toq smartwatch," which was immediately followed with another smartwatch announcement by Samsung.