InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

TI Boosts Speed, Cuts Costs of ‘C55xx DSPs

Last month Texas Instruments announced two new members of its ’C55xx family, the TMS320VC5501 and the TMS320VC5502. At a projected clock speed of 300 MHz, these new chips will bring the speed of the ’C55xx family—which currently tops out at 200 MHz—more in line with that of its main competitor, Analog Devices’ ADSP-2153x “Blackfin” family. BDTI’s analysis shows that at the projected clock speed of 300 MHz, the new ’C55xx chips will be about 15% slower on typical DSP tasks than the currently Read more...

ADI Ships 300 MHz TigerSHARC

On December 16th Analog Devices announced a new member of its high-performance fixed-/floating-point TigerSHARC family, the ADSP-TS101S. The chip runs at 300 MHz in a 0.13-micron process and is already in full production at this speed, according to ADI. The ADSP-TS101S is intended for high-performance multiprocessor applications, including telecommunications infrastructure, medical imaging, industrial instrumentation, and military electronics. BDTI has not yet benchmarked TigerSHARC, but Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Processor Designers’ Sad, Sad World

Stroll the halls of any computer engineering graduate school and you will doubtless encounter numerous students brimming with ideas for cranking up processor speeds. Until recently, graduates of these schools found a warm welcome in the PC processor market, which seemed to have an insatiable need for speed. Today, however, fewer and fewer PC buyers are willing to pay a premium for more speed—after all, who needs a 3 GHz processor to write a letter to Grandma? If the PC market no longer needs Read more...

Intrinsity’s 2 GHz Processor Begins Sampling

In April Intrinsity announced general sampling of the 1.5 and 2 GHz versions of its FastMIPS and FastMATH processors. Both processors are based on the MIPS32 architecture; the FastMATH processor adds a matrix math engine to the baseline architecture. The combination of high clock speed and matrix-processing capabilities give the Intrinsity FastMATH processor impressive signal-processing speed on algorithms with ample opportunity for parallel processing. On BDTI’s Complex Block FIR Filter Read more...

PXA250-based PDA Performance Problems Probed

Intel’s PXA2xx processor family is making significant headway in the high-end PDA market. Last month, for example, Sony began shipping the first Palm OS-based PDA powered by a PXA2xx. Although the PXA2xx has gained wide acceptance in high-end PDAs, some reviewers (for example, at CNET.com) have complained that PXA2xx-based PDAs are not appreciably faster than PDAs based on its predecessor, StrongARM. Some reviewers have been particularly critical of the lack of improvement on multimedia Read more...

Software Defined Radio: Ready for Prime Time?

Last month BDTI participated in the Software Defined Radio Forum’s first conference. Judging from the presentations given at this conference, software defined radio (SDR) is quickly evolving from an interesting but somewhat academic concept to a mainstream technology. The main driver of this transformation may be the U.S. Department of Defense’s commitment to SDR. Today’s military operations require communications among different branches of the armed forces, but different armed forces Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Easy Money

In October, ARM Ltd. announced two unhappy firsts: its first-ever quarter-to-quarter sales decline, and its first layoffs. Prior to these developments, ARM seemed to have discovered a bulletproof business model that was easy to mimic: just whip up a core, license it, and let the royalty checks roll in. Indeed, ARM’s previously uninterrupted ascent, coupled with the ready availability of venture capital, gave rise to a flood of new processor core licensors in the late 90’s. In truth, core Read more...

BOPS Quietly Calls it Quits

BOPS, Inc. quietly began auctioning off its patent portfolio last month, signaling the end of its operations as a vendor of high performance licensable DSP cores. Given the current business climate, the failure of another licensable core vendor is hardly surprising. (For more examples, see our story on Lexra.)  However, BOPS had a few things working against it beyond the industry slow-down. The BOPS architecture was based on a complicated, scalable array of powerful processing elements. At Read more...

Embedded DRAM Comes of Age

Several vendors recently unveiled embedded processors containing large amounts of on-chip RAM—but not the SRAM usually found in embedded processor chips. Instead, these new processors integrate copious quantities of on-chip DRAM. Embedding DRAM with processing logic can greatly improve on-chip memory bandwidth by providing access to the wide internal bus structures present in DRAM. Combining embedded DRAM (eDRAM) with processing logic also creates an opportunity to choose between cost and Read more...

Wireless MMX: A Look Under The Hood

Last month Intel announced its “Wireless MMX” extensions for its ARM-based XScale architecture. Wireless MMX includes functionality equivalent to the integer components of the x86 MMX and SSE instruction sets. Like its x86 counterparts, Wireless MMX uses single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) techniques to perform eight 8-bit, four 16-bit, two 32-bit, or (in a few cases) one 64-bit operation with a single instruction. Although the x86 and XScale implementations of MMX provide equivalent Read more...