Portable electronics devices are incorporating increasingly sophisticated multimedia capabilities, while at the same time striving to meet tough size, weight, battery life and cost requirements. Recently, a BDTI client launched a design for a new portable multimedia system requiring billions of floating-point operations per second and low input-to-output latency, and single-digit power consumption to enable compact and fan-less system operation. Robust software development tools were also a key requirement, to facilitate future software upgrades by the manufacturer and its network of partners.
What would you do if you found yourself needing to quickly a processor to meet a challenging set of specifications? This particular company called BDTI. After an initial review of the client's requirements, BDTI leveraged its trusted relationships with processor suppliers to identify both existing and not-yet-announced promising candidate processors including:
- DSPs
- DSP-plus-CPU combinations
- Mobile application processors
- Multi-core embedded CPUs
- FPGA-plus-CPU combinations
BDTI's engineers then made use of their expertise in benchmarking, optimization and multimedia application development to quickly evaluate how the candidate processors fit the client's requirements. This evaluation encompassed not only processor performance and features but also development tool strengths and shortcomings—which ended up being decisive considerations. In addition, BDTI enabled the client to understand processor vendors' strategies and roadmaps, to assess vendors' commitment to long-term support and evolution of their products.
The final output of the project was a short list of processor options, ranked on multiple criteria:
- Performance
- Power consumption
- Cost
- Development effort
- Scalability
- Availability
- Roadmap
Based on BDTI's analysis, the client was able to quickly make a final processor selection and proceed with its product design, confident that the design could be completed on time, on budget and on spec. To learn more about how BDTI's processor evaluation services can help you meet your product goals, contact Jeremy Giddings at +1 925 954 1411 or giddings@BDTI.com.
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