The Digital Signal Processor Derby
SEMICONDUCTORS The newest breeds trade off speed, energy consumption, and cost to vie for The an ever bigger piece of the action Digital Signal Processor BY JENNIFER EYRE Derby Berkeley Design Technology Inc. pplications that use digital signal-processing purpose processors typically lack these specialized features and chips are flourishing, buoyed by increasing per- are not as efficient at executing DSP algorithms. formance and falling prices. Concurrently, the For any processor, the faster its clock rate or the greater the market has expanded enormously, to an esti- amount of work performed in each clock cycle, the faster it can mated US $6 billion in 2000. Vendors abound. complete DSP tasks. Higher levels of parallelism, meaning the AMany newcomers have entered the market, while established ability to perform multiple operations at the same time, have companies compete for market share by creating ever more a direct effect on a processor’s speed, assuming that its clock novel, efficient, and higher-performing architectures. The rate does not decrease commensurately. The combination of range of digital signal-processing (DSP) architectures available more parallelism and faster clock speeds has increased the is unprecedented. speed of DSP processors since their commercial introduction In addition to expanding competition among DSP proces- in the early 1980s. A high-end DSP processor available in sor vendors, a new threat is coming from general-purpose 2000 from Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas, for example, is processors with DSP enhancements. So, DSP vendors have roughly 250 times as fast as the fastest processor the company begun to adapt their architectures to stave off the outsiders.
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