re Xilinx and DSP:
Some brainiac finally figured out a way to convince designers that you really can do certain DSP algorithms faster and more efficiently in an FPGA than in a DSP. Consider this - A pretty good sized Xilinx FPGA can do 3-4 times the number of Multiply-Accumulates (MAC - a basic DSP function) that TI's latest and fastest DSP can do. The biggest one can do 10x what TI can do. To do more MACs, you throw a larger FPGA at the problem. Your performance goes up almost linearly with the size of the part.
Summary - FPGAs do fixed applications (like FFT, DFT, Filters, etc) way faster and more efficiently than DSPs. DSPs, however, can do varying tasks that FPGAs cannot efficiently do, such as system control, I/O processing, etc. The ideally efficient system will have a DSP plus FPGAs for some dedicated processing.
Using FPGAs for DSP is a bleeding edge technology that is about to explode, but I don't think the explosion is quite here yet - need more engineers to come to the above realization.
Lastly, the Xilinx architecture seems to be better suited for DSP applications than any competing architectures, and Xilinx has lots of factory resources (has had for some time) on this segment of the market so I see good things to come.
Lewis |
