Breaking the I/O bottleneck for high-compute performance processing with Xtensa LX configurable and extensible processor architecture
G. Ezer · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2005
The challenges of new embedded applications have conflicting requirements: complex algorithms, evolving standards, shorter product cycles dictate programmable solutions, and yet, high data bandwidth, compute power and lower power consumption dictate carefully crafted hardwired functional modules. An application specific instruction set processor (ASIP) is ideally suited to provide most of the advantages of hardwired logic, while maintaining the time-to-market and programmability advantages of a general purpose processor. This paper presents the unique blend of high compute performance and i/o bandwidth of the configurable and extensible Xtensa LX ASIP architectures. Xtensa LX provides high compute performance with wide instruction words using multiple operation slots that enable superscalar performance suitable for data-intensive applications. Xtensa LX also provides high I/O bandwidth through its multiple load/store units that provide parallel low latency access or external DMA access to local memories and virtually unlimited number of ports and queues directly connected to the processor core functional units and system control registers, which remove the I/O bottleneck of traditional processors. The advantages of Xtensa LX features are proven with their impressive performance results: 171.6 ConsumerMark on out-of-the-box simulation of EEMBC consumer suite and a BDTIsimMark2000™ score of 6150 at 370MHz.