Industry Expert Blogs

When Synopsys bought Virage Logic in 2010, ARC processor IP was in the basket, but at that time ARC processor core was not the most powerful on the market, and by far. The launch of EV6x vision processor sounds like Synopsys has moved ARC processor core by several orders of magnitude in term of processing power. EV6x deliver up to 100X higher performance on common vision processing tasks than the previous generation EV5x! In fact, even if EV6x is part of ARC CPU IP family, this vision processor is a completely new product, defined to address high throughput applications such as ADAS, video surveillance and virtual/augmented reality.

EV6x has heterogeneous multicore architecture including one to four high-performance vision CPU cores. Each vision CPU includes a 32-bit scalar unit and a 512-bit wide vector DSP and can be configured for 8-, 16- or 32-bit operations. In the maximum configuration of four vision CPU cores, the processor delivers up to 620 GOPS/s with full scatter-gather and predication capabilities. From the competitive comparison table below, we can extract the main EV6x differentiators: at 500 MHz, vector DSP delivers 384 GOPS, or 50% more than the closest competitor; CNN performance is even more impressive, with 800 MACs per cycle, when the other two competitors are offering 128 MACs/cycle!

Click here to read more ...