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OMAP 4 Ups Performance with Dual Cortex-A9 Cores By BDTI, 3/18/2009 Texas Instruments recently announced its next-generation application processor family, OMAP 4.  The OMAP 4 chip family targets smart phones and mobile internet devices (MIDs) and incorporates a number of distinct processing engines. General-purpose processing is provided via a dual-core SMP processor based on two ARM Cortex-A9 cores, both of which include the NEON multimedia extensions. As shown in Figure 1, OMAP 4 chips also include an imaging engine (TI’s ISP), graphics engine (Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR SGX540), programmable video engine (TI’s IVA3) and “audio backend engine” (TI’s ABE). (More)

High-Performance CEVA-XC Core Targets 4G Handsets, Infrastructure By BDTI, 3/18/2009 In February CEVA announced a new family of high-performance licensable DSP cores, the CEVA-XC family. CEVA-XC cores target 4G cellular applications, including LTE and WiMax, and are intended for use not just in handsets (as with previous CEVA cores) but also in infrastructure hardware.  The CEVA-XC is an offshoot of the CEVA-X architecture (the “C” stands for communications), but the new core family is much more powerful than its predecessors. The highest-performance version supports, for example, up to 64 parallel multiply-accumulate (MAC) computations per cycle, compared to four for the CEVA-X1641.  CEVA has not announced specific clock speeds, but says that it expects CEVA-XC to easily reach 500 MHz in a 65 nm process with a fully synthesizable design. Silicon area has not been disclosed. (More)

Improving Products and Product Announcements—Cost-Effectively By BDTI, 3/18/2009 We all know that test marketing is the best way to see if a product meets buyers’ needs.  Household and consumer product manufacturers test their products with a select test market as a matter of course.  They use test marketing as a rehearsal for product introduction and to avoid disasters.  For technology developers and vendors, test marketing can be just as valuable, but finding the right test market can be tricky.  After all, the right test market is the target market—and when this is the case, there’s little room for error. (More)

Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Innovation Thrives Even in Tough Economy By Jeff Bier, 3/18/2009 The news in our industry certainly is discouraging these days. Every week we read about high-tech companies succumbing to the economic crisis. Big companies are having big layoffs, and small companies are quietly disappearing. Start-ups are unable to secure funding. (More)