Kristoff,
It seems to me that the OMAP series chips with Floating Point (C6/C7) DSPs
would be ideal for HAM purposes, but:...
1. To the best of my knowledge, you *must* use TI's CCS development tools
to access the DSP functionality, and follow fairly complex rules for
coordinating data transfer and resource management between the DSP and
CPU('s). Though some of these tools are based on GNU gcc/g++, some (and
especially library code) are not. This seems to take a coder out of the
Open Source world pretty quickly.
2. Talking to TI support people for another project seems to indicate that
all of the OMAP products (except perhaps the OMAP-L137/138) are
considered 'High Volume Customer' products, and support is only provided to
customers purchasing $1M+ volumes. The following is from a note I sent to
a client some time back:
"As I have feared, TI's future plans continue to de-emphasize their
ARM+DSP products. Monday I attempted to speak with their telephone
support and was told that most of the OMAP processors are no longer
considered general market products and are only supported for 'very
large volume customers', meaning ones who purchase in multiple 100K+
volumes. They were very nice about it. They just did not have
support personnel who were up to date on these products."
"It seems that the number of customers who have need of DSP
functionality beyond that bundled in the pre-programmed floating
point, video acceleration, audio and video decoding, etc. is
vanishingly small. And with the processing power of the multiple
general-purpose cores in these chips, specialized programmable DSP
functionality no longer rates a core of its own."
"I have seen a steady decrease in the information available on the DSP
portion of these platforms with each successive family. With the OMAP
55XX series it is scarcely mentioned at all."
"The one exception to this is the OMAP-L137/138 Integra DSP+ARM
packages. They are supported, and supposedly will continue to be.
Up to date, relevant (audio processing) examples are available. See:
http://www.ti.com/product/omap-l138
I believe that the OMAP-L138 has a tightly coupled C674x DSP running
at 456 MHz coupled to an ARM-9 CPU, Also running at 456MHz. Much like
the OMAP 3530 in the Beagle XM. This would seem to be more than
powerful enough for your purposes."
"A development system for this chip is shown here:
http://www.mitydsp.com/products-services/cpu-engines/mitydsp-l138/";
This may or may not be correct, but it is my impression
The tools are there, and so is the documentation. But expect a really
tough go tracking them all down and keeping them up to date.
The situation is similar or possibly worse with other vendors of this class
of products. I have stuff for Samsung, Marvell, Freescale, etc. If you
are not Apple, you can buy them, but don't ask any dumb questions.
Dave Witten, KD0EAG
------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:22:10 +0200
> From: Kristoff Bonne <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [Freetel-codec2] Codec2 for uC or DSP
> To: [email protected]
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Bruce,
>
>
>
>
> On 23-04-13 22:05, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > On 4/23/2013 12:54 PM, Curt, WE7U wrote:
> >> On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, Kristoff Bonne wrote:
> >>
> >> Now there's a BeagleBone for $45 too. I haven't looked at the specs to
> see whether it has floating point, but maybe another possibility?
> >>
> >> 1GHz Cortex-A8, 2GB on-board flash, microSD, microHDMI, ethernet, $45:
> >>
> >> http://goo.gl/SsqE6
> > It's a Sitara, related to the one in our AM335x starter kit which we'll
> > be showing at Dayton, except that the starter kit has a touchscreen,
> > bluetooth, and wifi. I think the BeagleBone Black has 4 processors on
> > chip: a Cortex A8 (which I think does have floating point), C7 DSP (OK
> > if you want to invest the time), two PRUs. A PRU is very simple scalar
> > in-order 32 bit processor with 4K program RAM and the ability to access
> > all of the on-chip peripherals and to share a pair of mailbox registers
> > and some RAM with the main processor. It does the real-time and
> > sleep-mode jobs more efficiently than the main processor.
> This kind-of makes me think of TI's OMAP soc devices that have one (or
> more) cortex-A CPUs + an additional cortex-M for "slow stuff".
>
>
> Just wondering, will it actually be able to access these additional
> processors?
>
> I have a pandaboard which is OMAP4430 based. That chip also has an
> additional DSP core and a GPU.
>
> However, I never really found a good document that describes how to
> actually use the. I read that the DSP core had to be addresses via some
> special API, that was about it.
>
>
> So, will we be able to use these additional cores?
> I would be interested to know how coding this kind of enviroment really
> is done.
>
>
> 73
> Kristoff - ON1ARF
>
>
>
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>
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