Anyone use Tensilica processors?

Hi

Has anyone used Tensilica processors? What has been your experience? Their website and sales guys claim very impressive results for a range of applications (because you can optimize/configure the processor for your application).

S.G.

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SG
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I worked at Luxxon Corp. a few years ago and we implemented an ultra low power programmable video processor around a Tensilica processor (I don't remember which one specifically).

We had perhaps a dozen or two custom instructions and several added registers in the processor core (to handle bit stream encoding and decoding, mostly) and some external block that were pretty independent of the Tensilica core to do DCTs, IDCTs and motion detection/compensation for the most common DCT or DCT-like compression protocols.

We also used the Nucleus RTOS.

The pluses --

Their web based tools seemed to work pretty well (being web based, support was better than I would expect from other vendors, but I've not used other vendors, either). Updating the core was pretty fast (a day or so, if I remember correctly).

They had a pretty good C compiler (Gnu based) and integrating in-line assembly to access the custom hardware worked out pretty well. Since then, they have released the port back to the FSF, and I think today we might even be able to make the code generator/optimizer take adavantage of added blocks for even better performance per MHz.

The architecture is pretty decent for embedded SoS designs, with a simple, large register file.

The only big minus I was hit with --

The interrupt handling was really ugly if you wanted to do any of it in other than pure assembly code. Perhaps they have addressed this since then?

Anyway, I have very limited exposure to their competitors, but I would not be adverse to using Tensilica in the future. I could certainly have been stuck with a much worse environment!

--Charles

Reply to
Charles Marslett

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