November 3, 2009 -- Sundance Multiprocessor Technology, Ltd. has introduced of its EVP6472 embedded development platform, an off-the-shelf multiprocessor, multi-core solution that features dual Texas Instruments, Inc. TMS320C6472 digital signal processors (DSPs). A first for the EVP6472 is design support from 3L’s Diamond multiprocessor tool-suite. Diamond enables easy access to the on-board 12 C64x+ cores and allows the designer to rapidly build, model, test and iterate different design architectures by moving tasks between the processor cores.

The EVP6472 is ideally suited to the development of high-performance applications such as high-end industrial, mission critical, test and measurement, communication, medical imaging, blade server and high-end image and video processing.

The six-core C6472 leads in power-consumption efficiency. The 500-MHz C6472 is the best power-performance multi-core DSP with 0.15mW/MIPS at 3GHz. The 700-MHz C6472 with a total 4.2GHz performance and 4.8MBytes of on-chip L1/L2 memory is among the highest performance DSPs from TI. The C6472 architecture was designed to ensure a maximized subsystem performance on a chip. One of the advantages of this architecture is that in addition to dedicated Layer 1 (L1) and Layer 2 (L2) memory to each core, C6472 features 768-kBytes shared L2 program/ data memory and a shared memory controller to facilitate high efficient and flexible inter-DSP core communications.

The EVP6472 is provided with a TIM carrier card and a modular plug-in that features dual C6472 multi-core DSP, a Virtex5 FX30 FPGA with embedded PowerPC, 2 banks of DDR2 memory, Rocket Serial Link (RSL) connectors and a host USB 2.0 interface. The development platform is supported by TI’s Code Composer Studio (CCS), and the 3L Diamond tool-suite that allows developers to separate the implementation of their application into a software section based around communicating tasks, and a hardware section built from processors joined by data-transfer links. Tasks can be placed on any of the twelve C64+ cores and the Diamond API allows the efficient exchange of data between tasks. Diamond uses its built-in device drivers to support uniform communication, automatically using the shared memory between tasks and a virtual channel system is also available for deadlock-free data routing.