Six-core DSP stresses energy efficiency
By Robert Cravotta, Technical Editor -- EDN, November 6, 2009
Texas Instruments’ new six-core TMS320C6472 DSP boasts a 3.68W power-use sweet spot when operating all six cores at 500 MHz with 80% usage. The cores support 625- and 700-MHz operation with a trade-off of energy efficiency at the 500-MHz operation point. The device includes 4.8 Mbytes of L1 and L2 memory partitioned so that each core has a dedicated portion of the memory as well as access to 768 kbytes of shared L2 program/data memory. The shared memory controller provides no hardware-based coherency support, so applications requiring coherency require software management. Connectivity peripherals include GbE (gigabit Ethernet), Serial RapidIO, DDR2, a telecom-serial-interface port, a host-port interface, Utopia, I2C (inter-integrated circuit), and GPIO (general-purpose input/output). These devices target high-end industrial, test-and-measurement, communication, medical-imaging, high-end imaging and video, and blade-server designs.
The TMS320C6472 is available now at prices starting at $140 (1000). The TMDXEVM6472 evaluation module is available for $349. The module includes a single C6472 processor with 256 Mbytes of 533-MHz DDR2 memory; 128 Mbytes of NAND-flash memory; 1 Mbit of I2C EEPROM for local or remote boot-up; two RGMII (reduced-gigabit-media-independent-interface); 10/100/1000-Mbps Ethernet ports with MDIO (management-data input/output); an RS-232 UART; a 170-pin AMC (advanced-mezzanine-card)expansion module for SRIO (serial RapidIO), TSIP (Trimble Standard Interface Protocol), EMAC1 (Ethernet media-access controller), and I2C; and a C6455 HPI (host-port-interface) daughtercard connector.
Development support for the C6472 include Adaptive Digital Technologies’ GPak framework, which supports high-density VOIP (voice-over-Internet Protocol), AT&T-certified G.168 echo cancellation, conferencing, and transcoding applications. Enea support software includes the OSECK (operating-system-environment compact-kernel) RTOS (real-time operating system), Linx messaging layer, dSpeed data-plane-management framework, and the Optima Eclipse-based system-debugging tools. The RadiSys Promentum ATCA (advanced telecom-computing architecture)-9100-TI ATCA media-processing blade includes two purpose-built mezzanine cards to house as many as 20 six-core TI C6472s per blade. Sundance’s EVP6472 supports two TI C6472 multicore DSPs with an FPGA with 3L’s Diamond RTOS. Surf Communications’ toolbox includes multiscreen transcoding, video streaming, high-scale conferencing, content enrichment, and quality boosting for the C6472.
