General-purpose processor has best benchmarks yet

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Dec 3, 2004

The EEMBC has published benchmark scores for Patriot Scientific's Ignite 2FX.

The EEMBC has published benchmark scores for Patriot Scientific's Ignite 2FX, a 32bit processor based on a hybrid of RISC and dual-stack architectures and targeting applications requiring low power consumption, a low gate count and a small memory footprint.

Tested against the EEMBC Consumer benchmark suite in a 600MHz simulation, and using the Ignite C Compiler Version 1.10, the Ignite 2FX achieved an out-of-the-box score of.01808 Consumermarks per megahertz, making it the highest-scoring certified out-of-the-box score on a per-gate basis for any general-purpose processor to date.

The EEMBC Consumer benchmark suite measures device performance in digital imaging tasks including JPEG compression and decompression, highpass greyscale filtering and RGB conversion.

"The Ignite 2FX Consumermark scores are remarkable in that this level of processing performance can be delivered by such a small number of physical gates without relying on cache or external resources", said Markus Levy, EEMBC President.

According to Patriot Scientific, the hybrid architecture of the Ignite 2FX combines the inherent advantages of RISC and stack architectures to yield a processor that combines affordability, a low gate count, and power efficiency with performance standards equal to or better than many conventional processors.

"I'm very pleased with our Consumermarks scores as they demonstrate an apex of system-level efficiency for which our industry has strived and clearly show our leading position in delivering efficient processing to applications where ultralow power, small physical size, and low system cost are critical", said Patrick Nunally, PhD, Chief Technology Officer of Patriot Scientific Corp.

"Conventional RISC architectures, with their internally pipelined structures, have benefited from decades of research and development, and have evolved into very efficient and extremely popular modes of computation", Nunally added.

"Stack processors are even more efficient and have been around even longer than RISC architectures, yet they still have not made it to mass markets because they lack versatility".

"By integrating these two technologies, the advantages of RISC and stack processing can finally be realised in a power-efficient, economical system design".