( ESNUG 447 Item 6 ) -------------------------------------------- [09/26/05]
Subject: A User Confirms That Those TenSilica Marketing Claims Are Legit
> Now for a public confession. For all these years, I had always thought
> of TenSilica as being a sad American knock-off of ARM, sort of a "me,
> too" IP company. It was at this DAC where I finally fully grasped that
> they are a *configurable* *customizable* microprocessor company. That
> is, lets say you have C code for a 32-bit RISC processor which runs
> and/or defines a printer or a DVD player or a Gameboy or whatever.
> TenSilica takes that C code and builds a custom processor which is tuned
> for that specific C code. (This differs from behavioral synthesis
> because you're not stuck working with a synthesizable subset of C.) The
> key here is that your TenSilica core is optimized for your C code; yea,
> it'll still run any C code, but it's *optimized* for your C code. Also,
> the TenSilica guys give you a C compiler, an assembler, a debugger, and
> an instruction set simulator tailored to your custom core. They claim
> that they can deliver the whole shooting match in under 2 hours. I
> didn't quite get this until I saw them at this last DAC.
>
> The TenSilica people happily reported that they had 1,555 visitors to
> their DAC booth this year, up 58% over last year's 984 visitors.
>
> - from http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad062905.html
From: [ Aqualung ]
Hi John,
Please keep me anon. Thanks.
With respect to TenSilica - I spent some time evaluating their core,
and from what I saw, it does everything they claim. In one afternoon,
I went from having virtually no knowledge of their core (although I
did have some limited CPU design experience) to having a fully
configured core, with the exact extension instructions I wanted (using
most of the core's configurability features). I also had a C compiler,
I had my code running on a profiler, and TenSilica synthesised my
configured core to give me timing results ready for the next morning.
Their claim of "2 hours" is perfectly reasonable in my experience
(although probably not for the first-time user without significant
hand-holding from TenSilica -- maybe a week is more appropriate in this
case, just to learn the tool). We never actually integrated their RTL
into our design, but what I saw was pretty good.
TenSilica is closer to ARC than ARM, but when I last looked, TenSilica
was miles ahead of ARC. ARC give you more flexibility in that you write
the entire extension in Verilog, and you are allowed to do pretty much
whatever you want, while TenSilica is more constraining, but TenSilica's
stuff is far more polished, with everything being automated.
I was very impressed with what I saw from TenSilica, and I wouldn't
hesitate to recommend them. In my experience, it's rare to find a company
whose products actually live up to the marketing claims, especially in
IP. I've seen some god-awful IP in my time from supposed high-quality IP
suppliers. In our case, the only thing that let them down was the cost;
we were unable to persuade our beancounters to pay for TenSilica.
- [ Aqualung ]
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