InsideDSP — In-depth analysis and opinion

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Signal Processing Algorithms Easier to Create, Harder to Sell

  One of the things I really love about digital signal processing technology is how, year by year, it gets easier to create new things.  Things like clever new audio or video compression algorithms, for example. Forget about needing mainframes, minicomputers, or expensive engineering workstations to evaluate that new algorithm. Today we’ve got powerful PCs and easy-to-use simulation environments that make the whole process relatively painless. Forget about the time, money, and risk Read more...

Massively Parallel Processors for DSP, Part 1

In the last few years a number of start-up companies have announced massively parallel processors for embedded DSP applications.  With their arrays of processing elements, these processors target high-end digital video, software-defined radio and other computationally demanding applications for which traditional DSP processors lack sufficient horsepower and ASICs are too inflexible or too costly to design. In some cases, massively parallel architectures are employed to reduce power Read more...

MIPS Announces High-Performance Superscalar Core

MIPS has introduced the MIPS 74K, a new, high-performance synthesizable general-purpose microprocessor core. The 74K targets demanding multimedia and networking applications, such as H.264 and WiMaX, and according to MIPS, the core has already been shipped to initial licensees. The 74K is a 32-bit, dual-issue, asymmetric superscalar architecture that supports out-of-order instruction execution and uses a 17-stage pipeline. According to MIPS, the 74K can achieve speeds of up to 1 GHz when Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—DSP Vendors Need Multi-Core Tools Strategy

There’s been a lot of press lately about start-up companies offering multi-core DSP chips.  What’s less widely discussed is that large, established DSP chip vendors have been offering multi-core DSP chips for years.  These chips have been popular in “channelized” applications where workload partitioning is fairly straightforward. But as multi-core DSPs move into a wider range of applications—and as the number of cores per chip grows—partitioning workloads among cores is becoming much Read more...

Case Study: Early Benchmarking Yields Better Products

Chip and IP vendors typically utilize benchmarks for marketing purposes—specifically, to demonstrate the capabilities of their products to prospective customers.  But processor vendors that use benchmarks for marketing purposes alone are missing half the picture:  during the design of a processor, subsystem, or chip, good benchmarks are invaluable for ensuring that the design is as good as it can be. Just as a carpenter needs accurate measurement tools to build a quality piece of furniture Read more...

Tips and Tricks for Debugging Audio

Introduction Are you designing a system that involves audio? Maybe an audio product or a product with an audio subsystem? Here are some tips and tricks that may help you. Designing audio systems and debugging audio presents some interesting challenges.  Sound is ruthlessly real-time; the speaker cone will keep moving, even if your prototype isn’t able to keep up with the flow of output samples required.  The same is true of a microphone:  the microphone diaphragm keeps moving and must be Read more...

ARM’s Cortex-A8 Armed for DSP, Multimedia

BDTI has released independent benchmark results  for the Cortex-A8, ARM’s highest-performance processor core, on the BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks™ and the BDTI Video Encoder and Decoder Benchmarks™. The results indicate that the Cortex-A8 is significantly faster than its predecessor, the ARM1176, giving it considerable horsepower for its targeted applications. Initially, the Cortex-A8 is being used in chips for high-performance cellular handsets; it also targets set-top boxes, printers, and Read more...

Plurality’s Hypercore Joins the Multi-Core Fray

There’s no shortage of startup companies with massively parallel processor architectures targeting high-performance signal processing applications, but Israel-based newcomer Plurality (www.plurality.com) isn’t discouraged. The company recently introduced a new multi-core architecture, Hypercore, that can support from 16 to 256 RISC processors on a single chip. Plurality is betting that its patented “synchronizer/scheduler” hardware—which the company claims enables “the programmability of a Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—As Signal Processing Workloads Evolve, So Must Processors

Historically, DSP processors have been the default choice for signal processing applications because they could efficiently process classical signal processing functions like FIR filters and FFTs. But those capabilities aren’t enough any more. Signal processing applications still include demanding real-time filtering and frequency transforms, but these algorithms are increasingly combined with processing that is fundamentally different. For example, algebraic signal processing computations Read more...

Case Study: Custom Benchmarks for Emerging Applications

Looking beyond today’s established high-volume applications, processor and SoC vendors often seek growth in promising emerging applications.  In entering any new market, vendors face two key challenges. First, they must ensure that their product is competitive;  and second, they must convince prospective customers of their product’s advantages. In emerging markets these challenges are more severe due to a lack of well understood application requirements and established benchmarks.  In Read more...