Cadence Expands Tensilica IP Portfolio with New HiFi and Vision DSPs for Pervasive Intelligence and Edge AI Inference

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. expanded its industry-leading Tensilica^® HiFi and Vision DSP families with the introduction of four new DSPs based on the recently announced Tensilica Xtensa^® LX8 processor platform. The new HiFi and Vision DSPs address increasing system-level performance and AI requirements for an expanded range of applications—delivering enhanced performance across multiple algorithms with even greater energy efficiency. The expanded portfolio includes the Cadence^® Tensilica HiFi 1s DSP and HiFi 5s DSP for audio/voice, lightweight imaging and AI applications and the Tensilica Vision 110 DSP and Vision 130 DSP for image sensor, camera, radar and lidar applications.

“With lengthy SoC design cycles and rapidly changing AI algorithms, our SoC customers require the utmost flexibility. On-device and edge AI systems feature numerous diverse sensors, so any AI inference solution must be adaptable to the end application requirements,” said David Glasco, vice president of research and development for Tensilica IP at Cadence. “Designing with a system-level perspective is crucial, and these SoCs must be energy-efficient, flexible and future proof to accommodate new neural networks. Cadence continues to make significant investments in our Tensilica product line, and our latest HiFi and Vision DSPs reflect that commitment.”

Xtensa LX8 Platform and Common Benefits

The new HiFi and Vision DSPs benefit from the inherent advantages of the Xtensa LX8 platform, including native AMBA^® AXI support for lower latency and L2 cache for increased system performance. Branch prediction enables a 5% to 20% reduction in cycles for both the HiFi and Vision DSPs. Supported by Cadence’s new NeuroWeave^™ Software Development Kit (SDK), the DSPs can be paired with the Cadence Neo^™ Neural Processing Units (NPUs) to offload AI inference workloads.

HiFi 1s and HiFi 5s DSPs

The new Tensilica HiFi DSPs add more capabilities for lightweight imaging and AI to meet market demands—enabling them to serve as additional compute resources beyond just audio, either as a standalone solution or complementing the Vision DSPs and Neo NPUs. Individually and collectively, the following features significantly improve out-of-box performance—dramatically reducing time to market (TTM) for OEMs and software developers:

• Double-precision floating-point acceleration provides up to 30X better out-of-box performance of popular codecs, enabling easier handling for computation requiring expanded dynamic range and precision
• Hardware/software co-design enhances auto-vectorization, greatly reducing the need for hand-optimized code and providing source code compatibility across HiFi DSPs
• New 8-bit operations in the HiFi 1s DSP boost imaging and AI performance by up to 2X at the kernel level, compared to the HiFi 1 DSP
• L2 cache increases system performance by up to 50%

Vision 110 and 130 DSPs

The 128-bit Tensilica Vision 110 DSP and 512-bit Vision 130 DSP offer numerous performance improvements to address growing sensor and AI workloads, offloading from the CPU or GPU while providing industry-best energy efficiency. Both DSPs deliver AI performance enhancements that enable up to 3X improvement for certain AI workloads and up to 5X improvement on specific kernels. Additional benefits include:

• Up to 20 percent higher frequency and up to 2X improvement for 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit floating-point performance
• Better system performance through iDMA enhancements previously available only on the flagship high-performance Vision DSPs
• Up to 3X improvements in fast Fourier transform (FFT) for radar applications
• Reduction in code memory footprint due to code size improvement
• Common SIMD and VLIW architecture and instruction set with Vision DSP predecessors ensure easy software migration