Latest imaging and vision DSP core offers up to 13X performance boost

Cadence Design Systems has announced the new Cadence Tensilica Vision P5 digital signal processor (DSP), its flagship high-performance vision/imaging DSP core. The imaging and vision DSP core offers up to 13X performance boost, with an average of 5X less energy usage on vision tasks compared to the previous generation IVP-EP imaging and video DSP. The Tensilica Vision P5 DSP is built from the ground up for applications requiring ultra-high memory and operation parallelism to support complex vision processing at high resolution and high frame rates. As such, it is ideal for off-loading vision and imaging functions from the main CPU to increase throughput and reduce power. End-user applications that can benefit from the DSP’s capabilities include image and video enhancement, stereo and 3D imaging, depth map processing, robotic vision, face detection and authentication, augmented reality, object tracking, object avoidance and advanced noise reduction. The Tensilica Vision P5 DSP core includes a significantly expanded and optimized Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) targeting mobile, automotive advanced driver assistance systems (or ADAS, which includes pedestrian detection, traffic sign recognition, lane tracking, adaptive cruise control, and accident avoidance) and Internet of Things (IoT) vision systems. The advances in the Tensilica Vision P5 DSP further improve the ease of software development and porting, with comprehensive support for integer, fixed-point and floating-point data types and an advanced toolchain with a proven, auto-vectorizing C compiler. The software environment also features complete support of standard OpenCV and OpenVX libraries for fast, high-level migration of existing imaging/vision applications with over 800 library functions. “There is an explosion in vision processing applications that require dedicated, efficient offload processors to handle the large streams of data in real time,” said Jeff Bier, co-founder and president, Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. (BDTI). “Processor innovations like the Tensilica Vision P5 DSP help provide the backbone required for increasingly complex vision applications.” Jon Peddie, founder of Jon Peddie Research, said: “The need for a more efficient but powerful processor is necessary for mobile devices transitioning into 4K resolution. This recent announcement of a new vision processor is essential for enabling next-generation devices.” Chris Rowen, CTO, IP Group, Cadence, added: “Imaging algorithms are quickly evolving and becoming much more complex – particularly in object detection, tracking and identification. Additionally, we are seeing a lot more integrated systems with multiple sensor types, feeding even more data in for processing in real time. These highly complex systems are driving us to provide more performance in our DSPs than ever before, at even lower power. The Tensilica Vision P5 DSP is a major step forward to meeting tomorrow’s market demands.” The Tensilica Vision P5 DSP is based on the Cadence Tensilica Xtensa architecture, and combines flexible hardware choices with a library of DSP functions and numerous vision/imaging applications from our established ecosystem partners. It also shares the comprehensive Tensilica partner ecosystem for other applications software, emulation and probes, silicon and services and much more. The Xtensa architecture is the second most popular licensable processor architecture, shipping at a rate of over 2B cores per year in products spanning sensors to supercomputers, says the company.