HiFi and Vision DSPs meet AI needs

24th October 2023

Mick Elliott

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Cadence Design Systems has expanded its Tensilica HiFi and Vision DSP families with the introduction of four new DSPs based on the recently announced Tensilica Xtensa LX8 processor platform.

These new DSPs address increasing system-level performance and AI requirements for an expanded range of applications—delivering enhanced performance across multiple algorithms with even greater energy efficiency.

The expanded portfolio includes the Cadence Tensilica HiFi 1s DSP and HiFi 5s DSP for audio/voice, lightweight imaging and AI applications and the Tensilica Vision 110 DSP and Vision 130 DSP for image sensor, camera, radar and lidar applications.

Pulin Desai (pictured), Group Director for Product Management and Marketing, Tensilica Vision and AI DSPs highlighted the point that with changing AI algorithms, Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) designers need flexibility and programmability.

Xtensa LX8 Platform and Common Benefits

The new HiFi and Vision DSPs benefit from the inherent advantages of the Xtensa LX8 platform, including native AMBA AXI support for lower latency and L2 cache for increased system performance.

Branch prediction enables a 5% to 20% reduction in cycles for both the HiFi and Vision DSPs.

Supported by Cadence’s new NeuroWeave Software Development Kit (SDK), the DSPs can be paired with the Cadence Neo Neural Processing Units (NPUs) to offload AI inference workloads. HiFi 1s and HiFi 5s DSPs The new Tensilica HiFi DSPs add more capabilities for lightweight imaging and AI to meet market demands—enabling them to serve as additional compute resources beyond just audio, either as a standalone solution or complementing the Vision DSPs and Neo NPUs.

Individually and collectively, the following features significantly improve out-of-box performance— dramatically reducing time to market (TTM) for OEMs and software developers:

• Double-precision floating-point acceleration provides up to 30X better out-of-box performance of popular codecs, enabling easier handling for computation requiring expanded dynamic range and precision

• Hardware/software co-design enhances auto-vectorization, greatly reducing the need for hand-optimized code and providing source code compatibility across HiFi DSPs

• New 8-bit operations in the HiFi 1s DSP boost imaging and AI performance by up to 2X at the kernel level, compared to the HiFi 1 DSP

• L2 cache increases system performance by up to 50