PARIS, — Tensilica introduced HiFi EP, a superset of the HiFi 2 architecture that is optimized for simultaneous multichannel codec support and continuously expanding audio pre- and post-processing.
These enhancements result in up to 40 percent lower power and up to a 50 percent size reduction over competing solution, according to the IP vendor.
The HiFi EP Audio DSP adds a novel and unique 32x24 MAC (multiply accumulator) for higher performance at lower power on the popular DTS Master Audio Lossless decoder used in Blu-ray Disc devices.
DTS Master Audio decoding on the HiFi EP DSP requires only 115 MHz of processing power, a savings of over 40 percent compared to other licensable DSP cores, thus reducing power consumption and making it possible to implement a full Blu-ray-Disc-capable home entertainment audio subsystem on only one HiFi EP core.
Other DSP architectures require the use of 2 on chip DSPs, translating into an increase of 2x or more in chip area and power.
Because of the efficiency of the architecture, power consumption is minimized making HiFi EP well suited for low-power portable applications.
To address the increasingly demanding requirements in mobile and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) applications for better immunity to background noise and speakerphone mode quality, new instructions have been added to accelerate voice pre- and post-processing for noise cancellation and beam forming microphones.
These instructions also provide better general DSP capabilities. Tensilica also enhanced the cache memory subsystem for HiFi EP DSPs with a predictive prefetch unit to improve performance in high memory latency SOC designs while preserving ease of programming.
In a Blu-ray Disc SOC with a typical 100 cycle memory access latency to off-chip memory, a HiFi EP DSP can run the complete worst-case workload Blu-ray Disc suite (DTS Master Audio Lossless 5.1 channels at 192 kHz, DTS Express 5.1 channels at 48 kHz, upsample, downsample, mixing and DTS Transcode to 5.1 channels at 48 kHz) in only 384 MHz.
Competing architectures often require 600 to 800 MHz of DSP bandwidth for the same workload.
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