TI C66x core surpasses all other DSPs in the market

MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, BARCELONA, SPAIN: Continuing to lead the industry with the highest performing digital signal processors (DSPs), Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) announced a greater performance achievement with its TMS320C66x DSP core, which is at the heart of TI’s multicore DSPs.

At 1.5 GHz, TI’s C66x DSP surpasses the performance of any other DSP in the industry, achieving the highest scores on both fixed-and floating-point performance in benchmark tests conducted by the independent third-party analysis firm, Berkeley Design Technology Inc. (BDTI).

“Core performance is extremely important even for advanced multicore devices,” said Niels Anderskouv, vice president, DSP Systems business, Texas Instruments. “For wireless base stations, our C66x cores coupled with powerful accelerators mean throughput and spectral efficiency will continue to rise, and power per bit will continue to fall. For multicore customers in the mission critical, high-end imaging and test and automation markets it means they can now build products they only dared to dream of just a few months ago. Our C66x DSP and KeyStone multicore architecture are major breakthroughs in the industry, and this is just the tip of the iceberg on the performance and innovation we will deliver to our customers over the next 12 to18 months.”

This marks the second time in three months that TI has achieved the highest scores on the fixed- and floating-point categories of the BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks. The BDTImark2000 is one of the industry’s most trusted benchmarks for DSP performance. It provides a summary measure of digital signal processing performance, based on a number of algorithms that are typically used in digital signal processing applications.

TI’s C66x DSP core in the TMS320CC6672 was benchmarked at a clock speed of 1.5 GHz and achieved a BDTImark2000 score of 12,860 on the floating-point portion of BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks and a score of 20,030 on the fixed-point portion of BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks. These scores are higher than any other scores in the industry for DSP cores certified by BDTI. TI is currently sampling the C6672 dual core device at 1.5 GHz with more devices in the KeyStone family to follow this year.

Earlier, TI introduced a new System-on-Chip (SoC), the TMS320TCI6618, for wireless macro and compact base station applications, which is also based on the C66x DSP core. The TCI6618 delivers double the LTE performance and a 2x power/performance improvement over other base station SoC solutions developed in 40-nm process technology, and has been characterized as “effectively breaking the constraints of Moore’s Law by doubling performance in less than six months and not changing any process nodes to achieve it,” according to Jagdish Rebello, senior director and principal analyst, IHS-iSuppli.

Additionally, for the small cell market, TI released a new base station platform, the TMDXSCBP6616X, focused on 3G and 4G high speed data systems.