Toshiba processor benchmarks favourably

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Dec 22, 2003

Benchmark score results for Toshiba's new Media Embedded Processor (MeP) have been published by EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium.

Benchmark score results for Toshiba's new Media Embedded Processor (MeP) have been published by EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium.

Tested by the EEMBC Certification Labs (ECL) in a 285MHz simulation environment, the MeP received an out-of-the-box score of 0.08793 ConsumerMarks per megahertz (or 25.1 at 285MHz).

EEMBC's consumer benchmark suite tests the performance of processors and compilers in digital imaging applications, including highpass greyscale filter, JPEG codec and RGB conversion kernels.

"It is gratifying to see Toshiba, a founding EEMBC member, among the industry leaders that are making validated performance information about their processors available to the public", said Markus Levy, EEMBC President.

"The EEMBC scores for the MeP core demonstrate the excellent efficiency of the architecture even without hand-tuned optimisations, but equally as important is that Toshiba is making a major contribution to advancing EEMBC benchmarking in the SOC IP realm".

Toshiba's configurable MeP media processor combines a 32bit RISC core containing a five-stage pipeline that supports 16 and 32bit-length instructions and user custom instruction extensions including a VLIW coprocessor to perform data-centric applications such as multimedia, image processing, communications and audio processing.

The MeP core can be customised for a specific task and embedded into a media processing SoC.

"EEMBC benchmark scores for the MeP-c2 core illustrate the strength of Toshiba's MeP for digital media applications", said Dr Tohru Furuyama, General Manager of SoC Research and Development Centre, Toshiba Corp.

"In addition to the optimised Red Hat GNUpro C-compiler, the MeP's predefined optional 'multiply-accumulate' instructions provide improved performance and code density that greatly benefit the developers of digital media SoCs".

A detailed EEMBC benchmark score report on the Toshiba MeP is available now from the EEMBC website.