Benchmarks

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Smartphone Benchmarks: Caveat Emptor

Smartphones have become the most important application for high-performance, energy-efficient processors (see "ARM's 2015 Mid-Range Platform Prep: A 32-Bit Next-Step" in this month's edition of InsideDSP). That's because smartphones are a huge and growing business, and processors make a big difference in how smartphones perform – and how long their batteries last. As a result, interest has been growing in smartphone processor performance, and there's been quite a bit of benchmarking activity. Read more...

Qualcomm's QDSP6 v5: Benchmarking Results Confirm That Floating-Point Support Has Arrived

Toward the end of an article published in the February 2013 edition of InsideDSP, analyzing BDTI's published benchmark results of Qualcomm's QDSP6 (aka "Hexagon") v4 DSP core, you'll find the following prescient quote: Qualcomm is, of course, not done innovating with Hexagon. The June 2012 InsideDSP article uncovered evidence of an upcoming QDSP6 v5, which the company officially unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show last month within its newest Snapdragon 800 Series SoCs. QDSP V5 expands Read more...

BDTI Evaluates Floating-Point DSP Performance and Energy Efficiency of Altera 28 nm FPGAs

Back in September 2011, an InsideDSP article described a just-published analysis conducted by BDTI and sponsored by Altera, evaluating the viability of implementing complex hardware-accelerated single-precision floating-point functions on FPGA fabric. As I wrote then: To date, FPGAs have been used almost exclusively for fixed-point digital signal processing functions. Although FPGA vendors have long offered floating-point primitive libraries, the performance of FPGAs in floating-point Read more...

QDSP6 V4: BDTI Benchmark Results and Implementation Details Of Qualcomm's DSP Core

The article, "QDSP6 V4: Qualcomm Gives Customers and Developers Programming Access to its DSP Core," which appeared in the June 2012 edition of InsideDSP, showcased Qualcomm’s decision to open up access to its DSP core via a software development kit. This decision corresponded with the release of the fourth version (V4) of the sixth generation (QDSP6, aka "Hexagon") of the company's proprietary DSP architecture, found in the company's 28 nm-based Snapdragon S4 SoCs. To be clear, this broadened Read more...

Case Study: Choosing the Right Benchmarks for the Job

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? One obvious Read more...

QDSP6 V4: Qualcomm Gives Customers and Developers Programming Access to its DSP Core

"There's been at least one DSP core in every chip that Qualcomm's ever made." Qualcomm senior director of product management Rick Maule used this statement as his lead-in to an explanation of the latest-generation QDSP6 architecture, specifically where it fits in the company lengthy DSP development heritage. QDSP6, if you haven't already figured out, refers to Qualcomm's sixth-generation DSP core architecture and is also commonly referred to by its "Hexagon" marketing moniker. The sixth- Read more...

New Freescale DSP Core Benchmarked By BDTI, Debuts In Macrocell Base Station SoC

After some five years of architecture definition work and several years of development, Freescale's new StarCore SC3900 DSP core will see its first silicon implementation next quarter in the QorIQ Qonverge B4860 processor for macrocell base station designs, unveiled last month at the Mobile World Congress conference. As mentioned last August in InsideDSP (see "Next-Generation Power Architecture-Based SoCs Embrace Advanced Lithography, Core Virtualization, SIMD Instruction Set"), Freescale Read more...

Medfield: Will Intel's Long-Standing x86-in-Smartphone Aspirations Finally be Fulfilled?

Intel has been striving to shoehorn the x86 CPU architecture into handheld communications and computing devices ever since the company began publicly discussing the Atom architecture in late 2007. First- and second-generation Atom-based CPUs and associated core logic chipsets found predominant success in netbooks. But Intel also targeted low-voltage and reduced-clock-speed variants (in some cases also swapping out internally developed graphics accelerators for PowerVR cores licensed from Read more...

Case Study: Choosing the Right Benchmarks for the Job

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? One Read more...

Texas Instruments Announcements Span the Processor Spectrum

Back in November 2010 at Electronica in Munich, Germany, Texas Instruments unveiled the TMS320C66x DSP family, then consisting of a quad-core communications SoC (the TMS320C6670) along with three pin-compatible conventional DSPs in two-, four- and eight-core variants (the TMS320C6672, TMS320C6674 and TMS320C6678), all based on the company's earlier-unveiled KeyStone architecture. At that same time, TI trumpeted its products' fixed- and floating-point performance results on the BDTI DSP Kernel Read more...