Performance evaluation and benchmarking of native signal processing

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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1999.