As applications become more complex, and processors become more powerful, system developers increasingly rely on off-the-shelf software components to enable rapid and efficient application development. This is particularly true in digital signal processing, where application developers expect to have access to libraries of optimized building-block functions to speed their work.

Qualcomm has been evolving its in-house DSP core for many years. Originally developed for use in Qualcomm’s cellular modems, more recently it has also found use as an application co-processor, offloading multimedia tasks from the CPU in smart phones and tablets.

In May 2014, Synopsys expanded its ARC EM licensable processor core product line, which BDTI described as historically being "vanilla" Harvard architecture CPUs with no DSP-optimized features, via the addition of the digital signal processing pipeline-equipped EM5D and EM7D (“D” denoting DSP).

In 2012, I wrote about how mobile application processors were becoming increasingly popular in embedded systems. Since then, this trend has accelerated, fueled in part by low-cost development boards aimed at enabling embedded system developers to evaluate these chips and quickly create prototype products.

Today's smartphones are technological marvels that deliver an extraordinary range of capabilities from GPS-based navigation to sophisticated photography. But sometimes we just want to make a phone call. And particularly when we're on the move, who hasn't struggled to hear the other party or to be heard on a mobile call?

Back in early 2013, the smartphone market was red hot, as was demand for Amazon's Kindle and other e-book readers. And the tablet market, although comparatively nascent, was in a rapid growth phase, as was interest in alternative computer platforms such as Google's Chrome O/S-based products.

Sensory's TrulyHandsFree software, which InsideDSP last covered at its v3 introduction in early 2013, precedes limited-vocabulary speech recognition with voice detection involving a specific key word or phrase.

"The economy, stupid" was one of the phrases that strategist James Carville hung on a sign in Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign headquarters – a reminder to focus on what's most important. In a similar vein, the reminder "It's the memory bandwidth, stupid" should probably be prominently displayed wherever computer vision software developers work.

When engineers set out to design a system (such as a wearable or handheld device) for minimum power consumption, there's a tendency to focus on selecting the most energy efficient processor and on optimizing the software for maximum efficiency. These are important steps, to be sure, but when the application is based on digital signal processing, choosing the right algorithms can be even more important.

"General-purpose GPU" (or "GPGPU") refers to the use of graphics processors for a variety of non-graphics tasks, and is a frequently discussed topic here at InsideDSP. GPUs are massively parallel processors, originally designed to only handle vertex and pixel operations.