/> The LTE standard allows a wide range of configurations for base stations, from a low-bandwidth, single-antenna configuration supporting a few users and low data rates up to configurations supporting 20 MHz bandwidth, more than 8 antennas, and data rates of 300 Mbps or thousands of users in a cell. Previously, the only way to evaluate a processor's ability to support such configurations was to actually implement an LTE standard-compliant solution on the processor. And even after doing so, it has been impossible to make fair comparisons between processors because of differences in the LTE functionality implemented on each processor. Similarly, it has been virtually impossible to make fair comparisons of processors for LTE terminals in terms of cost and power consumption. The new benchmark under development by BDTI and mimoOn overcomes these difficulties by providing a uniform workload incorporating the key elements of LTE baseband processing.

Matthias Wesseling, CTO of mimoOn, said: The evaluation of alternative hardware platforms for complex applications can be a very time-consuming and expensive task. Having high-quality benchmarks which are tailored to these applications is a huge step in simplifying and speeding up such evaluations.

Jeff Bier, president and co-founder of BDTI, said: Over the past 15 years, BDTI's benchmarks have become the gold standard for evaluating processing platforms targeting digital signal processing applications such as wireless communications and multimedia. Now that LTE equipment has become a key growth market for processors, BDTI is pleased to collaborate with mimoOn to bring reliable benchmarks to this space.