TABLE OF CONTENTS the 545CK has powerful DSP extensions that push it past every licensable processor core ever benchmarked by Berkeley Design Technology (BDTI).
Tom Halfhill, Microprocessor Report
The Diamond 545CK vector DSP core is a high-performance, 3-way superscalar RISC CPU core that has been tailored to deliver very high performance on a wide range of DSP tasks. This DSP core is based on the Xtensa LX processor with a modified version of the Vectra LX vector DSP extensions and additional instructions that further enhance the core s DSP performance. Other instructions add control over the core s input- and output-queue interfaces. The Diamond 545CK DSP core s three super-scalar execution pipelines, dual 128-bit load/store units, and 64-bit FLIX-format instructions allow the processor to break the 1-instruction-per-clock barrier.
The Diamond 545CK DSP has several ISA extensions to the base Xtensa architecture that enhance DSP performance. These additions include a 16-entry, 160-bit vector register file, a vector DSP ALU with 20-bit precision per vector, eight 18 18-bit multiplier/accumulator (MAC) units, special-purpose function units for bit packing and unpacking and Viterbi decoding, a second load/store unit required for XY memory operations, and 32-bit input- and output-queue interfaces for high-speed I/O. These extensions were developed in conjunction with Berkeley Design Technology, Inc (BDTI), a firm that specializes in analyzing and benchmarking DSPs. The extensions improve the performance of a wide range of DSP tasks as reflected in the BDTImark2000 benchmark functions, listed in Table 12.1.
