DATAPLANE PROCESSING UNIT MORE FLEXIBLE THAN DSP

摘要

Baseband communications dataplane processing is one of the most demanding environments around. Tensilica's ConnX Baseband Engine is designed to address this challenge (see the figure). Tensilica calls its architecture a dataplane processing unit (DPU), in contrast with CPUs and DSPs.rnThe processor cores are based on Ten-silica's Extensa LX. The system includes one scalar core plus eight SIMD cores. Very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) instructions control the scalar core plus an eight-way dual ALU engine and SIMD engine. The system is fed by 160-bit registers and a pair of 128-bit memory interfaces. It can mange up to eight vector divides and two square roots or four complex FIR taps or radix-2 and radix-4 butterfly operations/cycle. Also, it can perform 16 18-bit MAC operations/cycle.