Peripherals
[FIG8] The picoChip picoArray.
[FIG9] Tilera TILE64 multicore DSP processor.
One such a benchmark is
the Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. (BTDI) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) benchmark [17] that was used to evaluate and compare the per- formance of some single and multicore DSPs in addition to other processing engines. The BTDI OFDM benchmark is a sim- plified digital signal processing path for a fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based OFDM receiver [17]. The path consists of a cascade of a demodulator, finite impulse response (FIR) filter, FFT, slic-
er, and Viterbi decoder. The benchmark
does not include interleaving,
carrier recovery,
symbol synchronization, and frequency-domain equalization.
Peripherals
Table 2 shows relative results for maxi- mizing the number of simultaneous non- overlapping OFDM channels that
can be processed in real time, as would be needed for an access point or a base station. These results show that the four considered mul- ticore DSPs can process in real time a high- er number of OFDM channels as compared to the considered single-core processor using this specific simplified benchmark.
However, it should be noted that this application benchmark does not necessarily fit the use cases for which the candidate processors were designed.
In other words, different results can be produced using dif- ferent benchmarks since single and multi- core embedded processors are generally developed to solve a particular class of func- tions that may or may not match the benchmark in use.
At the end, what matters most is the actual performance achieved when the chips are tested for the custom- er’s desired end solution.
