TI's TMS320C66x DSP delivers industry's top results on fixed and floating-point performance

DALLAS, USA: Texas Instruments Inc.'s (TI) new TMS320C66x digital signal processor (DSP) generation surpasses the performance of any other DSP core in the industry, achieving the highest scores on both fixed-and floating-point performance from benchmark studies conducted by the independent third-party analysis firm, Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. (BDTI).

Testing the C66x DSP core separately on the fixed-point performance and the floating-point categories of the BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks suite yielded the highest scores in the industry for both sets of tests. The score for the C66x DSP core on the floating-point category of the benchmark is more than two times higher than any previously benchmarked device.

"On floating-point performance the C66x delivered a BDTImark2000 score of 10,720 – far above the performance of previous-generation floating-point DSPs. This will enable application developers to develop initial application implementations using floating-point math, and then decide whether performance-intensive sections of the code should be migrated to fixed-point to boost performance," said the respected technology analysis firm BDTI in its InsideDSP newsletter.

"Having both on the same chip should prove to be a real advantage, as TI is the only supplier offering high-performance, multicore DSP chips that support both fixed- and floating-point."

As a combined fixed-and floating-point DSP core capable of instruction by instruction execution of the two processing modes, TI's C66x core achieves even greater performance in an application where each segment of code is executed in its native processing mode.

Integration of fixed-and floating-point capability in the C66x DSP core eliminates costly algorithm conversion from floating-point to fixed-point and allows developers to create code with high precision that runs on a high-performance device.

The BDTImark2000 is one of the industry's most trusted benchmarks for DSP performance. It is comprised of a number of algorithms that are typically performed by DSP processors.

The C66x DSP core was benchmarked at a clock speed of 1.25 GHz and achieved a BDTImark2000 score of 10,720 on the floating-point portion of BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks, more than two times higher than the previous high score. The same C66x core received a BDTImark2000 score of 16,690 on the fixed-point portion of BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks, higher than any other DSP core certified by BDTI.