Ramakrishnan:The 67XX is the very first DSP chip where I believed it was actually necessary to use a development system rather than writing assembler. The very long instruction word, sometimes executing 16 instructions in parallel (!!!!!) makes it almost a requirement to use computer aided optimization tools to reorder instructions. It is understandable why these tools are not free. I also think that nearly four thousand dollars a seat is absolutely outrageous. Thank goodness I get an educational discount. I played these games by hand when I was programming the DSP56001 (which also had multiple functional units running in parallel) but it was manageable. The other thing I like about it is that it also does fixed point natively and it really blisters in those modes. For truly high speed operation, it is critical to use optimized libraries for the "big things".
Bob Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan wrote:
Bob, another big problem with using C-incapable DSP chips is the fact that once these are obsolete, it needs to be ported to the new processor. C67x is a nice part. I use C64x in my day job and have used all the other 16-bit fixed point TI parts too (I work for TI). If there were free tools, I would have definitely prefered to use a C67xx part for PIC-A-STAR, which would have given me more MIPS to do more interesting stuff and also write everything with C. Ramakrishnan
-- Laziness is the number one inspiration for ingenuity. Guilty as charged!