Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking of Native Signal Processing
DSP processor growth is phenomenal and continues to grow rapidly, but general-purpose microprocessors have entered the multimedia and signal processing oriented stream by adding DSP functionality to the instruction set and also providing optimized assembl
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Abstract. DSP processor growth is phenomenal and continues to grow rapidly, but general-purpose microprocessors have entered the multimedia and signal processing oriented stream by adding DSP functionality to the instruction set and also providing optimized assembly libraries. In this paper, we compare the performance of a general-purpose processor (Pentium II with MMX) versus a DSP processor (TI’s C62xx) by evaluating the effectiveness of VLIW style parallelism in the C62xx versus the SIMD parallelism in MMX on the Intel P6 microarchitecture. We also compare the execution speed of reliable, standard, and efficient C code with respect to the signal processing library (from Intel) by benchmarking a suite of DSP algorithms. We observed that the C62xx exhibited a speedup (ratio of execution clock cycles) ranging from 1.3 up to 4.0 over the Pentium II, and the NSP libraries had a speedup ranging from 0.8 to over 10 over the C code.
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Introduction
Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and multimedia applications are ubiquitous and the demand for such capabilities on general-purpose processors is increasing. Multimedia and signal processing oriented workloads have been projected to be a dominant segment of future workloads [1]. Traditionally, DSP applications were being performed solely on a dedicated DSP processor that is specialized to do the intense number crunching tasks presented by various signal processing algorithms. However, there are several reasons as to why one might want to use a general-purpose processor instead of a DSP processor. The main driving force behind this initiative is the fact that instead of using a DSP processor for signal processing and a general-purpose processor for other tasks; space, cost and overall system complexity can be improved by moving the signal processing onto the general-purpose processor and eliminating the DSP processor. It was also found that in certain applications general-purpose processors outperform DSP processors [2]. General-purpose microprocessors have entered the multimedia and signal processing oriented stream by adding DSP functionality to the instruction set and also providing optimized assembly libraries. Perhaps, one of the earliest and most visible example of this approach to signal processing was Intel’s Native Signal Processing (NSP) initiative with the introduction of the MMX (commonly dubbed as MultiMedia eXtension) set to the traditional x86 architectures. In addition to MMX instructions, P. Amestoy et al. (Eds.): Euro-Par’99, LNCS 1685, pp. 266-270, 1999. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1999
Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking of Native Signal Processing
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Intel also provides optimized C-callable assembly libraries for signal and image processing [3]. Such media processing capabilities are foreseen to make profound changes in the use of current microprocessors [4]. DSP and media processing applications have been known to be structured and regular. The approach adopted by NSP extensions such as MMX has been to exploit the available data parallel
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