by Cherif Assad
The debate for performance has always been a passionate one in the engineering community. In the semiconductor industry, nearly every competitor claims to have the most innovate architecture that offers the highest performance.
Let’s make an attempt to sort out the requirements of a relative performance evaluation. The intrinsic core performance and workload behavior are important, but not enough. The interaction with the peripheral set –analog to digital, digital to analog conversion, multiplexing, bus switch to memory access – is the litmus test to determine the real value behind a piece of silicon. The compiler is provided by a software tools vendor, which may help to optimize the source code execution to come to the result expected. Now remains the essential element about the methodology for an objective assessment.
You can select a software benchmark given for generic tests, and you can also use algorithms dedicated for special functions or to measure signal processing capability. In automotive, specifically powertrain, there are several key parameters calling for high performance microcontrollers (MCUs) to determine real time position: the engine’s cog, angle-to-time conversion, road speed calculation, and lookup tables.
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