On May 5th, TI announced that it had demonstrated a ’C64xx chip running at 1GHz. TI did not announce any ’C64xx products at this clock speed, but indicated that it expects to be sampling such chips in the first half of next year. (The fastest ’C64xx devices currently available run at 720 MHz.) The new TI chips will target signal-processing intensive applications such as communications infrastructure equipment and high-definition video systems.
TI’s demo is intended to give its customers confidence that the company can deliver next year on its promise of 1 GHz chips—a move likely intended to counteract skepticism resulting from TI’s (and other vendors’) past difficulties in achieving advertised speeds. The demo may also serve to refocus media attention on TI’s products following Analog Devices’ recent announcement of a 600 MHz Blackfin chip.
Current 720 MHz ’C64xx chips are fabricated in a 0.13-micron process, while the new gigahertz chips will use a cutting-edge 90-nanometer process. This migration will make TI one of the earliest adopters of the new process generation. At 720 MHz, BDTI’s benchmarks show that the ’C64xx is the fastest mainstream DSP processor currently available—nearly twice as fast as, for example, the new 600 MHz Blackfin. At 1 GHz, the new ’C64xx chips will be about 40% faster than earlier family members, which will almost certainly enable TI to keep the title of fastest mainstream DSP nicely in hand.
You don’t have to look much beyond mainstream DSP processors, however, to find faster chips. Intrinsity is already sampling a 2 GHz chip that can easily best a 1 GHz ’C64xx (see the May 2003 edition of the DSP Insider). And BDTI’s recent benchmarking of DSP-enhanced FPGAs—such as Altera’s Stratix—indicates that even a low-end DSP-enhanced FPGA would be much faster in some applications than the ’C64xx, regardless of the ’C64xx’s planned clock speed increase. But neither of these competitors has the impressive support infrastructure and broad market acceptance that are integral to TI’s appeal.
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