Experimental Evaluation of Embedded DSP Architectures

In the embedded processor market, there are various types of DSP processors. Among them, 4 processors are widely used: Texas Instrument TMS320C64xx families, ARM processor families, analog devices TigerSHARCregprocessors, and free-scale SC3400 StarCore. However, the performances of these 4 DSP processors have never been compared together. This paper presents a comparative performance study for these four popular types of DSP processors. Different code strategies, such as TFRM, TFBBGM, recursive & iterative structures, are incorporated in FFT codes for four DSP processors. The experiments unveil that free-scale StarCore-Based DSP families have the best performance for input size larger than 64 points.