Success Story: Designing a Processor Using BDTI Benchmarks

A leading processor manufacturer was developing its next-generation high-performance DSP processor.

The processor incorporated a variety of architectural innovations to enable high performance across a a range of applications. A key challenge faced by the design team was ensuring that the processor would meet its aggressive specifications.

To address this need, the processor developers employed three benchmark suites from BDTI:

With assistance from BDTI, the processor developers carefully optimized the three benchmark suites for their architecture, and verified functionality and performance by running the code on a cycle-accurate simulator.

The benchmark results showed one major surprise: in one class of algorithms, the processor was not achieving the targeted performance. Diagnosing the situation, the designers realized that one of the processor’s features was not correctly designed: it functioned correctly, but didn’t yield the expected performance. Having discovered this prior to tape-out, the designers were able to correct the error with minimal budget and schedule impact.

To discuss how you can leverage BDTI benchmarks to help with your next design, contact us via the web or call us at +1 925 954 1411 today.  All inquiries are confidential.