Adapteva's Epiphany Floating Point Processor Core: A Leading-Edge Lithography May Finally Open Doors
Cost- and power consumption-sensitive digital signal processing applications tend to leverage fixed point processors, for a common fundamental reason: fixed-point processor cores are substantially less complex than their floating-point counterparts, leading to reductions in transistor count and silicon area. Yet fixed-point processing comes with trade-offs of its own; code development, for example, is complicated by the need to comprehend the potential for overflow, underflow and round-off errors. And floating-point processors also tend to support wider data words and are therefore inherently capable of higher dynamic range.
A floating-point digital signal processor is often preferable to its fixed-point counterpart, therefore, in traditional markets such as high-end audio and image processing and various medical and military/aeronautics systems. And were a floating-point processor to ever achieve fixed point-like cost and power consumption metrics, it might also be of interest in consumer electronics' embedded vision and multimedia processing and other mainstream high-volume applications. Adapteva, with the company's Epiphany platform, believes that its floating point DSP architecture is optimized for such tasks, and the recent combination of a cash infusion and a successful 28 nm lithography shrink bolster the company's confidence.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Flexible Pixel Processor Video IP
- Bluetooth Low Energy 6.0 Digital IP
- MIPI SWI3S Manager Core IP
- Ultra-low power high dynamic range image sensor
- Neural Video Processor IP
Related Blogs
- ARM Cortex-A15 - does this processor IP core need a new category ... Superstar IP?
- Samsung 20nm test chip includes ARM Cortex-M0 processor core. How many will fit on the head of a pin?
- Processor Wars: NVIDIA reveals a phantom fifth ARM Cortex-A9 processor core in Kal-El mobile processor IC. Guess why it's there?
- Want more information on the ARM Cortex-M0+ processor core?
Latest Blogs
- Breaking the Silence: What Is SoundWire‑I3S and Why It Matters
- What It Will Take to Build a Resilient Automotive Compute Ecosystem
- The Blind Spot of Semiconductor IP Sales
- Scalable I/O Virtualization: A Deep Dive into PCIe’s Next Gen Virtualization
- UEC-LLR: The Future of Loss Recovery in Ethernet for AI and HPC