Inside the Intel PXA27x

A BDTI Technical Evaluation

The Intel PXA27x, announced in April 2004, is a 32-bit fixed-point embedded processor family that targets PDAs and mobile wireless products—most notably, smart phones. The PXA27x is the next generation of Intel Personal Internet Client Architecture (PCA) application processors.

The PXA27x is based on an enhanced version of the Intel XScale core that is used in its predecessors, the PXA255 and the PXA26x PCA family. The key enhancement is the addition of Intel’s new “Wireless MMX” coprocessor and instruction set. Wireless MMX is intended to accelerate the processor’s performance on signal processing applications.

This report provides an independent analysis and evaluation of the digital signal processing capabilities of the PXA27x processor. It examines the key features of the PXA27x, including its data paths, execution units, memory architectures, and programming model.

The signal processing performance of the PXA27x is evaluated using a suite of digital signal processing benchmarks developed by BDTI. The report includes benchmark execution times, cost-execution times, and memory usage results for the PXA27x. Execution times combine cycle count results with the clock speed for the processor; cost-execution times combine execution-time results with chip pricing, as reported by the manufacturer.

The complete set of PXA27x benchmark results is included in an appendix in both tabular and graphical format and is presented alongside the results for several other processors to illustrate relative performance on digital signal processing algorithm kernels

This report is intended for anyone interested in understanding the signal processing performance and capabilities of the PXA27x processor. This report is especially useful for electronic system designers, hardware and software engineers, processor designers, engineering managers, and product marketing managers. It will aid in assessing the suitability of the PXA27x for a given application and will allow designers to make informed decisions when considering this processor for their latest designs.

Like all of the reports in the Inside series, Inside the Intel PXA27x:

• Is based on hands-on programming experience
• Includes industry-standard BDTI Benchmark™ results
• Identifies processor strengths and weaknesses
• Compares performance to that of key competitors
• Provides timely analysis from the established leader in DSP technology analysis

Report includes analysis of the PXA27x:

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. About the Authors
3. Qualitative Analysis of the Intel PXA27x
4. Overview of Competitors
   • ARM ARM9E
   • Intel PXA255
   • NEC Electronics μPD7705x
   • Texas Instruments OMAP5910
5. Analysis and comparison of benchmark results
6. Conclusions
7. Appendix: Complete BDTI Benchmark Results for the PXA27x and Competitors

Excerpts from BDTI's analysis

“The PXA27x is based on the Intel XScale core, which is similar to the XScale core currently employed in previous PXA2xx family members and other Intel products. However, the PXA27x core includes Intel‘s new “Wireless MMX” coprocessor and instruction set. Wireless MMX provides equivalent functionality to the integer instructions included in the MMX and SSE instruction sets currently found on Intel Architecture processors such as the Pentium 4.”

“Wireless MMX offers a more powerful and higher performance mix of ALU and multiply instructions than offered by the XScale data path. BDTI expects that most DSP software written and optimized for the PXA27x will use the XScale data path only for load/store addressing, loop counter maintenance, and control tasks. In general, using the XScale data path for DSP-oriented computation will greatly limit the performance of the PXA27x.”

Sample benchmark results

BDTI's Vector Dot Product Benchmark
Execution Time in microseconds
(lower is faster)

Inside the Intel PXA27x includes over 90 pages of benchmark data, in tables and graphs, showing results on each of the 12 BDTI Benchmarks for the PXA27x and competitors.

BDTI's Inside Series

Inside the Intel PXA27x is the one of the many volumes in BDTI's series of focused technical analyses of single processors. The series currently includes the following reports:

The BDTI Benchmarks™

The benchmark results in Inside the Intel PXA27x are derived from the application of the BDTI Benchmarks, an industry-standard suite of DSP algorithm kernels. Each benchmark is painstakingly written and optimized in native assembly language following a strict specification.

Pricing, Shipping, and Ordering Information

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