Industry Expert Blogs

Digital signal processing is all around us. Today’s devices come with dozens of sensors, the data from which must be filtered and aggregated for use by artificial intelligence (AI) models. As these AI workloads become ubiquitous across all industries, embedded systems face a growing demand for powerful and efficient signal processing. These compute-intensive AI algorithms often have a limited amount of control code, primarily operate on data streams, and require hard real-time performance with low latency constraints.

Therefore, Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) have become an integral piece of the equation. Unlike general-purpose processors, DSPs offer parallel execution of vectorized computations for minimized cycle counts and latency. However, increasing vector size also requires more silicon area, making it necessary to strike the right balance between performance and efficiency.

This is why the industry needs more choices. Designers must pick a DSP that meets their application-specific performance requirements while staying within a given area and power budget. Fortunately, the Synopsys ARC VPX product family has just been extended to serve that need.

The new ARC VPX6 processor introduces 1024-bit vector processing to the lineup, extending the existing VPX family, which includes VPX5 (512-bit), VPX3 (256-bit), and VPX2 (128-bit) variants. As such, VPX6 doubles the attainable peak performance while preserving full software compatibility with the other members of the VPX family. By simply upgrading hardware without any recoding, designers can instantly realize performance gains from day one.

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