New Halo C Compiler from BOPS gets excellent results from EEMBC Benchmarking

Mountain View, Calif., June 13, 2001 BOPS, Inc., a leading provider of programmable broadband DSP cores, today announced that EEMBC Certification Laboratories (ECL), the independent benchmarking certification service and embedded product testing organization, has just finalized testing and certifying BOPS^® new Halo^TM C Compiler against the industry-standard EEMBC telecom benchmarks.

According to ECL chairman and chief technical officer, Alan R. Weiss, the Halo C Compiler is a "a good, solid compiler that with little programming effort emitted highly optimized code for this sophisticated, powerful architecture."

"Clearly when there is significant data to be crunched, BOPS Manta^TM with the Halo C Compiler is more than up to the job. While EEMBC does not have power consumption figures yet (that will be rolled out with EEMBC Version 2), a quick, uncertified estimate shows that BOPS architecture is outstanding in performance per milliwatt," he said.

"From the EEMBC results, it appears that the Halo C Compiler does an exceptional job of extracting the performance out of BOPS intricate architecture," said Markus Levy, president of EEMBC and industry analyst with Cahners MicroDesign Resources. "Close inspection reveals that the company had to make few modifications to the EEMBC code in order to achieve a big performance boost over its out-of-the-box performance."

In particular, the EEMBC results show that:

• About the Full Fury (hand coded) Benchmarks:
• BOPS Full Fury benchmarks are more than three times better than the nearest competitor as measured by the aggregate Telemark score from EEMBC's certified Telecom benchmark suite.
• Despite the fact that BOPS submitted a processor running at less than half the frequency of the leading competitor, BOPS out- performed all competitors in all five benchmarks in the Telecom benchmark suite.
• About the optimized C benchmarks:
• On a MHz basis, optimized C benchmarks from BOPS Halo C Compiler out-performed TI's 6203 compiler optimized C as well as Full Fury hand optimized Telecom benchmarks for Auto Correlation and Convolution Encoder.
• In some cases the BOPS Halo C Compiler generates code that is within a few percent (less than five percent) of the number of cycles used for hand-coded implementations.
• About the Out of Box benchmarks:
• BOPS Out of Box C benchmarks significantly out-performed many of the Out of Box C general purpose controllers, many that run much faster than BOPS 136 MHz processor.

The Halo C Compiler generates code that makes effective use of BOPS ManArray^® parallel architecture including: conditional execution, packed data types, indirect VLIW, and arrays of Processing Elements (PEs).

"This is the first compiler ever to effectively address multi-processing. The innate ability of the BOPS processor to perform many operations and functions in parallel enables more work to be done faster and at a lower clock rate," said Ken Pope, director, marketing, BOPS, Inc. "This in turn results in lower power and less expensive designs. The availability of this Halo C Compiler will open up to developers the option of programming in C while still extracting the tremendous performance inherent in BOPS ManArray architecture."

BOPS Halo C Compiler team is comprised of world-class developers with backgrounds from companies including IBM, TI, Intel, Motorola, and Lucent. BOPS has been developing its Halo C Compiler technology for nearly four years and has more than 75 man years of development invested.

About BOPS
Based in Mountain View, Calif., BOPS, Inc. develops and licenses a fully scalable, synthesizable DSP architecture that is programmable and reusable for evolving communications, mobile multimedia and wireless applications. BOPS' DSP architecture, cores, compilers, system tools and complete SOC designs offer total life-cycle solutions and rapid time-to-market. While providing the highest performance in the industry, BOPS cores are DSP co-processors to ARM, MIPS and other hosts and are supported by an extensive alliance of hardware, software, tools and design partners. For more information, please visit http://www.bops.com.

About EEMBC
Providing the embedded industry fair and certified benchmarks grounded in real-world applications, EEMBC is composed of more than 40 of the world's leading and most influential semiconductor and intellectual property companies. EEMBC members are committed to helping customers get product easier and faster through fair benchmarking and establishment of industry standards. Benchmarking fairness is provided through the EEMBC Certification Labs with offices in Texas and California. Certified benchmarking results are posted on the EEMBC Web site at www.eembc.org/benchmark.

Note to editors: BOPS and ManArray are registered trademarks of BOPS, Inc. Manta and Halo are trademarks of BOPS, Inc. All other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders.