InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

ARM's Cortex-A7 and A15: A Performance Versus Power Consumption Optimization Scheme

Last month's edition of InsideDSP included the article "NVIDIA and Qualcomm ARM Up Against Competitors," which discussed (among other things) NVIDIA's upcoming five-core Kal-El (i.e. Tegra 3) SoC. Tegra 3 combines four ARM Cortex-A9 cores built out of conventional 40 nm transistors and a fifth Cortex-A9 constructed from low-leakage (albeit switching speed-limited) circuits. The fifth core will operate stand-alone in low-performance usage scenarios (including, ironically, during high definition Read more...

NVIDIA and Qualcomm ARM Up Against Competitors

NVIDIA and Qualcomm, two leading ARM licensees and SoC implementers for high volume consumer electronics systems, are now sampling their latest-generation mobile application processors. Both companies recently published documentation describing the unique design techniques and features of their SoCs. A Tegra Quintuplet NVIDIA's current in-production product line consists of two generations of Tegra-branded devices. The initial Tegra family is a series of single-core devices based on the Read more...

New AMD CPU Architectures Make Notable Digital Signal Processing Advancements

Last month's announcement by Advanced Micro Devices that its "Bulldozer"-based Opteron microprocessors for servers had begun shipping to customers for revenue, followed by last week's release of first public benchmarks for Bulldozer-based AMD FX CPUs, capped off a year-long series of new CPU microarchitectures and devices for the company. Notably, the microarchitectures represent the first fresh offerings from AMD since 2007's K10 microarchitecture, which first appeared in "Barcelona" CPUs Read more...

Case Study: Strong Development Tools Boost Processor Competitiveness By Providing Access to Advanced Features

Today's SoCs typically include a variety of specialized co-processors and accelerators. In some cases, the chip supplier provides its customers with the ability to program these specialized engines. In other cases, the chip company does all of the programming, and provides API-level interfaces for application developers. Although lack of access can be frustrating to application developers, providing complete access to a chip's capabilities isn't necessarily the optimum course of action at a Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―Down with Fluff

In a recent consulting assignment, my colleagues and I at BDTI evaluated a semiconductor manufacturer's new-product introduction presentation and provided recommendations for improving it.  One of our key recommendations was to include data supporting major claims regarding the new product's advantages.  This may seem like an obvious idea, but after sitting through hundreds of briefings, I find that it's an idea that is not widely embraced among technical marketing people. I think that part Read more...

BDTI Study Validates FPGA Floating-Point Digital Signal Processing Viability, Altera Design Toolset Capabilities

In design situations where optimum performance and/or power consumption is required, implementing digital signal processing functions in dedicated hardware versus software becomes an attractive proposition. A FPGA is a particularly compelling silicon platform for realizing this aspiration, because it conceptually combines the inherent hardware attributes of an ASIC with the flexibility and time-to-market advantages of the software alternative running on a CPU, GPU or DSP. As such, FPGAs are Read more...

Sub-$2 DSPs Strive to Cost-Reduce Existing Applications, Expand Market Opportunities

Analog Devices and Texas Instruments both recently unveiled cost-optimized DSPs within one day of each other. Perhaps the seeming near-synchronicity was an innocent fluke. Then again, perhaps one vendor got an inkling of the other's announcement plans and decided that a near-coincident introduction would be an appropriate response. The exact circumstances don't particularly matter; the longstanding highly charged competitive climate between the two companies is fiscally and otherwise beneficial Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response―I Know How You Feel

A colleague recently told me that his young child, having been raised on iPhones and iPads, was amazed to find that the screen on his dad’s laptop did not respond to touch. His story reminded me of that wonderful scene in the movie Star Trek IV, where Scotty tries to use a computer by speaking into the mouse. These real and fictional anecdotes illustrate a critical truth about interactive electronic devices: the capabilities of these devices are largely defined by their user interfaces—and Read more...

Case Study: Choose Your Desert Island Companion Wisely

Remember that childhood game where you try to decide which famous person—or which book, or whatever—you’d like to have with you, if you were to be stranded on a desert island? Well, choosing a processor is kind of like that.  Except, with a processor, it’s not a game.  Once you’ve chosen a processor, and designed your hardware and software around that processor, it becomes very expensive—and very time-consuming—to switch to another processor.  So, you’re likely to be stuck with whatever choice Read more...

Microsoft Kinect SDK Released, Robotics Developer Studio Kit Enhanced

Embedded vision is a clear "poster child" for digital signal processing silicon and software technology, beginning with the algorithms employed in image capture (including exposure, color balance, lens aberration correction, etc) through edge detection and pattern matching, and extending all the way to frame analysis and response (motion tracking, for example). And Microsoft's Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360 game console, which sold 10 million units in its first five months on the market ( Read more...