Software configurable processors
From WikiCover
On July 2, 2007, Stretch Inc. announced the availability of release 2007.06 of the Stretch Integrated Design Environment (Stretch IDE) development tools with support for the S6000 family of software configurable processors for video and wireless signal processing. This latest release of tools allows customers to immediately begin S6000 application development and take advantage of the second-generation Instruction Set Extension Fabric (ISEF), the Processor Array, and the Programmable Accelerator.
Software configurable processors achieve their high performance by crushing software hot spots -- sequences of operations that get executed many times -- into single instructions executed in the ISEF -- a programmable fabric within the data path of the processor. With the new release, Stretch has added new algorithms to take advantage of enhancements such as the abundance of pipelining registers to increase throughput performance. The S6000 ISEF also features dedicated memory blocks, and the tools provide intuitive ways to stream data to these distributed memory blocks through either direct addressing or direct-memory access (DMA) BIOS calls.
The S6000 Family features Processor Array Technology, enabling system architects to intuitively scale their designs into high-performance, multi- processor systems. To utilize the dedicated high-speed links and network interface designed into S6000 devices, Stretch includes a Processor Array Basic Input Output System (PA-BIOS) with this release of the Stretch IDE. Using the rich library of supplied PA-BIOS calls, programmers can dedicate tasks, establish communication channels between processors, and share resources between processors. The PA-BIOS routine provides a programming model that enables customers to use a unified memory architecture and easily scale to a multi-processor configuration.
The Programmable Accelerator within S6000 devices offers a secondary processor with accelerated instructions of key wireless and video processing functions such as motion estimation, encryption, entropy encoding, and audio codecs. The new release offers full programming support for the Programmable Accelerator.