It seems that TI and other manufacturers have almost no activities nowadays in DSPs. There are now so many alternatives, including CPUs with enhanced processing cores, GPUs, FPGAs with processing cores, etc. So, are the days for dedicated signal processors over? This question has come up time and time again, but the timing seems right to ask it once again. What are your thoughts?
DSPs still have their niche. What I believe will happen is that their best features will be incorporated into new architectures. The world moves on.
Every mobile device has at least one DSP core. And there are more and more mobile devices in the market. I would not say they are obsolete. It is true that their uses are being reduced to certain specific tasks.
As Miguel Bordallo Lopez well said above, DSP chips are not dead. They are only becoming more embedded.
Good point, Miguel. I guess they are becoming more like processing cores embedded into FPGAs and custom chips.
I hope the DSP`s last longer on the market as you fear.
They are specialiced in signal processing even on low power architecture and reasonable costs.
FPGA structure is "stupid" on delivery, so you have to program DSP or µC functionality into it with high loss of logic cells. This means you have to buy FPGA`s with millions of logic cells at higher costs. They are flexible, power consumption is relatively high.
GPU`s can be used in PC architecture e.g. for simulations or games. Mobile application`s are not the target for using GPU`s. And another point of fast calculation in GPU`s is that you have to split your mathematical calculations to get a benefit of the parallel computation.
DSP`s are specialiced for signal processing, e.g. FFT, they can handle parallel instructions, low power consumption, mobile applications..... Often they have different (communication) ports, ADC, timers and more on board.
Regards,
Marc
I agree in most of what Marc says except in the point that "mobile applications" are not the target for using GPUs.
Actually there is a growing interest from researchers and developers to harness the mobile GPU to do general purpose processing. Specially in image processing and computer vision tasks.
Some of the newer mobile phones even use the GPU to do things in the camera pipeline that before were done using a DSP architecture...
Other than that, I also think that DSPs are going to be embedded in many devices for a while.
@Miguel
Yes, in applications where a GPU is already in use they don`t need an extra DSP. That minimises amount of chips (smaller pcb) and fabrication costs.
It's too early to eulogise the DSPs !!!
On the contrary, Moore's law means that their speeds are gonna increase to the point where they start being competitive (speed-wise) with certain FPGA applications, but the DSPs possess something still lacking in FPGA - lightning speed re-programmability (if you think FPGA are readily programmable, it means you have not gotten your feet in it itself). The dream is that the DSP cores be incorporated in ASICs, with the fast steady part cast in fixed Silicon and the slower parts that require re-doing it every generation of the ASIC are in the DSP-fast-reprogrammable part. This may cut down ASIC development cycle. Some optical communication ASIC vendors are looking at such approach
For slower applications (KHz etc) the ability to program the processing and prototype algorithmsiis quite valuable, and this can be done so well in real time that dedicated signal processors are of limited value in many contexts. We have scrapped pid and other dumb controllers in favor of DAQ2GO.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Engineering
- Electrical Engineering
- Signal Processing