Performance monitoring and tuning for a single-chip multiprocessor digital signal processor

A new generation of high performance programmable digital signal processors (DSPs) has a highly-integrated parallel architecture, incorporating special-purpose hardware features, on-chip memory and multiple processors into a single chip. For such single-chip multiprocessor DSPs, however, a sophisticated performance monitoring tool is essential to achieve the maximum performance. The authors discuss the requirements and functionality of performance monitoring tools suitable for single-chip multiprocessor DSPs. As a specific example, they describe a performance monitoring tool developed for Texas Instruments´ TMS320C80 (MVP), MVP Performance Monitor (MPM), which satisfies these requirements and functionality. The effectiveness of the MPM is demonstrated using an 8×8 block-based discrete cosine transform (DCT) implementation. An overall speed-up of 4.67 was achieved by using the MPM