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.)

To improve their products, technology providers need detailed, thoughtful feedback from users of their technology. Unfortunately, this feedback is often difficult to obtain. Typical users aren’t very motivated to provide detailed feedback; they’re interested in getting their product finished. When they run into a problem, they find the most expedient work-around and move on. They don’t have time to fully explore, document, and report on the problems that hinder their productivity, or to share their detailed ideas on how the product could be improved. 

Recently a friend of mine was lamenting the fact that so many new processors continue to be designed, and so few achieve any commercial success. “Why do people persist in designing new processors?” he asked. “Maybe because universities keep training processor designers,” I speculated. On closer reflection, though, I believe there’s more to the story.

Comparing licensable processor cores and quantifying their relative performance is challenging. Unlike processor chips, there are many different ways in which licensable cores can be configured, implemented, and fabricated, each of which yields a different combination of speed, area, and power consumption. Particularly for digital signal processing applications (which tend to push the limits on one or more of these metrics) it’s essential to have reliable and accurate performance data.

Editor’s Note: This article contains selected highlights from BDTI’s new report, FPGAs for DSP, Second Edition.

In September, Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) announced the TMS320C6720 floating-point DSP. Operating at 200 MHz and priced at a modest $5.75 (unless otherwise stated, all prices mentioned in this article are for 10,000 unit quantities), the chip is the latest and least expensive member of TI’s ‘C67x family of 32-bit floating-point DSPs. It is intended for cost-sensitive applications such as musical instruments, medical imaging and biometrics.

BDTI has released independent benchmark results for the ARM1176 licensable processor core on the BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks™, which measure overall signal-processing performance, and the BDTI Video Decoder Benchmark™, which measures performance on video decoding and similar workloads.

Many DSP-oriented systems are composed of multiple application tasks—e.g., an audio codec, a video codec, and a networking stack. During initial product development, the system designer typically divvies up the available processor MIPS among the tasks, and assigns the tasks to various engineering teams. These teams then go off to craft their code to stay within the MIPS they've been allocated. When all of the components are finished, the tasks are integrated together and the system designer runs the whole application for the first time.