Contributors: Bob Wheeler, Jag Bolaria, Joseph Byrne In This Issue Our new report “A Guide to Wireless Handset Processors, Second Edition” is now available. Learn about the newest products and technologies for baseband and application processors. Order your copy today! Last week, Infineon announced it is acquiring the DSL business of Texas Instruments. According to The Linley Group market share data, Infineon ranked fourth in DSL revenue for 2006 and TI ranked third; combined, the two generated $347 million, more than any single vendor. Thus, this acquisition should make Infineon the leading vendor of DSL chips. TI had once been the industry leader in DSL revenue. Its highly integrated AR7 processors are popular for ADSL modems and gateways. The company’s UR8 processor, however, suffered from extensive delays and did not meet its original specifications. At the same time, Broadcom introduced its own highly integrated devices and began to gain share from TI. At $205 million in 2006, TI’s revenue was roughly flat in a growing market. After the UR8 fiasco, the company destaffed its DSL development team and began to seek an opportunity to sell the business. Infineon’s Danube processors are also highly integrated solutions for ADSL gateways, but they have been less successful in the market, particularly outside of Europe. Unlike TI, which offers VDSL2 at only 8MHz, Infineon’s VDSL2 chips support all bands up to 30MHz. Danube also offers a more powerful CPU than the UR8 has and adds encryption functions. We expect Infineon to continue to support the UR8 while attempting to shift TI’s customers to Danube and its successors. Although this strategy is likely to result in some loss of customers, it will keep Infineon’s R&D cost steady while providing a big boost in revenue. With Conexant and Broadcom pulling away in revenue, this acquisition makes the DSL market a three-horse race. By adopting Infineon’s superior technology, TI’s DSL customers could be the big winners in this deal. —Linley Complete
coverage of DSL products from Infineon and TI appears in our
report A Guide
to SOHO Gateway Processors. BDTI has released independent benchmark results for the Cortex-A8, ARM's highest-performance processor core, on the BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks and the BDTI Video Encoder and Decoder Benchmarks. The results indicate that the Cortex-A8 is significantly faster than its predecessor, the ARM1176, giving it considerable horsepower for its target applications. These include ihigh-performance cellular handsets, set-top boxes, and automotive infotainment systems. As described on the Cortex-A8 benchmark result page, BDTI's results for the ARM Cortex-A8 do not include clock speed, silicon area, and power consumption data based on BDTI's standardized conditions for processor cores. For this reason, caution should be used in interpreting the Cortex-A8 benchmark results and in comparing the Cortex-A8 to other BDTI-benchmarked cores. (All other BDTI benchmark results for licensable processor cores assume a TSMC CL013G process with ARM Artisan Sage-X library and worst-case temperature, process, and voltage variations.) The Cortex-A8 achieves a BDTIsimMark2000/MHz score of 7.6. In comparison, the ARM1176 achieves a BDTIsimMark2000 score of 1200 at 335 MHz, or 3.6 DTIsimMark2000/MHz. (The BDTIsimMark2000 is a summary measure of digital signal processing speed, distilled from a processor's results on the BDTI DSP Kernel Benchmarks, a suite of 12 key DSP algorithms. A higher score indicates a faster processor.) This shows that, at an equivalent clock speed, the Cortex-A8 is significantly faster than the ARM1176 on typical signal processing tasks. The boost in horsepower is mainly due to the Cortex-A8's NEON signal processing extensions, which allow it to execute up to four 16-bit multiply-accumulate instructions per cycle (versus two for the ARM11). The Cortex-A8's results on the BDTI Video Encoder and Decoder Benchmarks show that it requires 114 MHz for QVGA decoding—less than half the loading of the ARM1176. These results also indicate that, at the clock speeds projected by ARM and TI, the Cortex-A8 will be capable of D1 decode and QVGA encode on the BDTI Video Encoder and Decoder Benchmarks. (The BDTI Video Encoder and Decoder Benchmarks are somewhat more demanding than typical H.264 Baseline Profile implementations.) DSPs tuned for video applications are likely to require even lower clock speeds, however, as indicated by BDTI's results for the NXP PNX4103. (The PNX4103 system-on-chip uses a TriMedia VLIW DSP core.) Even discounting its potentially higher clock speed, the Cortex-A8 significantly outperforms earlier ARM cores on signal processing and multimedia tasks. This level of performance is likely to open up new markets for ARM. Detailed results for the Cortex-A8 and many other processors are available for purchase from BDTI. —BDTI Selected
additional benchmark results for the Cortex-A8 appear on BDTI’s
web site and in our new report A
Guide to Wireless Handset Processors. Spreadtrum, a baseband-processor vendor based in China, went public on the Nasdaq exchange last week. The company shipped about 10 million baseband processors and modules last year, generating about $100 million in revenue. Taking advantage of the low cost of engineers in China, the company is already profitable, while other baseband companies with much higher revenue are not. Spreadtrum’s revenue currently comes from its GSM/GPRS processors, but it has also developed a processor for TD-SCDMA, the Chinese 3G standard, that it hopes will begin shipping in handsets by the end of this year. —Linley Complete coverage of Spreadtrum’s baseband processors appears in our report A Guide to Wireless Handset Processors. Think you know the ins and outs of Handset Processors? Test your knowledge by taking our quiz. Find out how much you really do or don't know.
For answers to this quiz, click here. If you need in-depth answers on these topics, you need to read “A Guide to Wireless Handset Processors.”
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