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.
By Robert Cravotta, Technical Editor -
EDN