What’s next for the world’s most powerful DSP?
Announcing 1 GFLOPS technology from TI
In the latest affirmation of its undisputed DSP dominance, Texas Instruments announces a floating-point DSP core that will provide single-processor performance of 1 billion floating-point operations per second (1 GFLOPS) on a single chip. The new core will support a new 32-bit, floating-point line of DSPs, the TMS320C67x generation, which complements and extends the groundbreaking VelociTI™ architecture already used in TI’s industry-leading, advanced-VLIW TMS320C62x fixed-point DSPs.
Not only does the ’C67x floating-point core deliver up to 10 times the performance of today’s fastest competitive offerings, but as a superset of the ’C62x instruction set, it makes TI the first DSP solutions provider to offer a code-compatible fixed- and floating-point architecture with a single learning curve.
"The VelociTI architecture lets DSP developers start with floating-point designs, and then seamlessly migrate to more cost-efficient fixed-point solutions," said TI Fellow and chief architect Ray Simar said at a recent gathering of the Microprocessor Forum.
In the first quarter of 1998, TI plans to release a new version of the ’C6x toolset that will fully support floating-point instructions. However, designers can use existing ’C6x tools to begin development of ’C67x floating-point systems today.
"Immediately," said Greg Da Silva, president and CEO of GO DSP Corporation, "that’s how fast DSP designers can start development and use the Code Composer IDE on the new ’C67x DSP. Since this is the first DSP chip family with code-compatible fixed- and floating-point DSP architectures, designers have an unprecedented time-to-market advantage."
"This compatibility with the ’C62x, the excellent tool set, the VelociTI architecture, and an expansive network of developers are an important component to Ariel’s success in the fast-paced networking market," remarked Ariel Corporation’s John Lynch, chief technology officer.
In addition to the wide range of telecom and datacom applications enabled by the ’C62x, the new ’C67x will enable next-generation advanced applications and bring faster speed, precision, and dynamic range to applications including wireless local loop base stations, beam-forming base stations, virtual reality 3-D graphics, voice mail, speech recognition, audio, radar, industrial control, atmospheric modeling, finite element analysis, and imaging such as fingerprint recognition, ultrasound, and MRI.
To achieve the industry’s first ever fixed- and floating-point code-compatibility, TI added floating-point functionality to six of the eight functional units inside the ’C6x CPU. These functional units are two ALU units, two auxiliary units, and two multiplier units. The ’C67x floating-point core can achieve 1 GFLOPS at 167 MHz today; and TI plans to triple ’C67x performance by the year 2000.
"We plan to offer a broad ’C67x floating-point product offering. Performance will range from 1 GFLOPS up to 3 GFLOPS by the end of the decade," said Mike Hames, TI Semiconductor Group vice president and worldwide DSP manager. "This technology also will enable prices less than $50 per device and will be complemented by a wide variety of mixed-signal application-enabling devices." Sampling of the first ’C67x devices, manufactured in TI’s 0.18-micron TImeline technology, is planned for the second half of 1998.
As the world’s number one DSP solutions provider, TI also has the largest number of floating-point customers worldwide and continues to encourage new designs using the 32-bit, floating-point TMS320C3x and TMS320C4x generations. For customers who need more performance, TI plans to offer translation tools from these existing architectures to the new ’C67x generation that will minimize rework and maximize ’C3x and ’C4x code investment. This ’C67x roadmap extends TI’s DSP market leadership well into the next century. "Once again, TI has shown its DSP leadership," said Peter Siy, president of White Mountain DSP.
Leading DSP third-party companies who have already announced they will support the new ’C67x core include 3L; Ariel Corporation; Coreco, Inc.; DNA Enterprises, Inc.; DSP Research, Inc.; DSP Software Engineering, Inc.; Eonic Systems; GO DSP Corporation; Hunt Engineering; Loughborough Sound Images (LSI); Mizar; Pentek, Inc.; RadiSys Corporation; Spectron; Spectrum Signal Processing; Sundance Multiprocessor Technology, Ltd.; Traquair Data Systems; Transtech Parallel Systems Corporation; and White Mountain DSP, Inc.
For more information, visit www.ti.com/sc/c67x.
