New DSP Families Set Impressive Performance Marks

The firm's already powerful presence in the DSP marketplace-- it presently claims a whopping 48% of the total market for digital signal processors-- is expected to grow even larger with the recent development of two new families of DSP cores that reportedly have set, by wide margins, world speed and power dissipation records. Operating at speeds of up to 1.1 GHz, the lightening-fast TMS320C64x family is said to deliver 10X the performance of today's fastest DSPs, while the energy-stingy TMS320C55x family is said to require only 15% of the power of the most energy-efficient DSPs available today while at the same time delivering 5X more performance.
The TMS320C64x DSPs can compute at nearly a 9-BIPS pace, enabling the devices to deliver huge amounts of data, video and voice into homes over a single broadband line. They also enable 3G base stations to send multimedia signals to wireless handsets. By contrast, the TMS320C55x DSPs (see diagram) are targeted at Internet appliances that combine voice, video and data. And with a 0.05-mW/MIPS power dissipation rate, the C55x processors reportedly can also make portable product batteries last weeks instead of days.