Digital signal processing with general purpose microprocessors, DSP and reconfigurable logic

Abstract

This paper compares selected digital signal processing algorithms on a variety of computing platforms in terms of achievable performance and cost. The experiments were carried out on a standard PC platform, DSP, a RISC microcontroller and on Xilinx XC4013XL FPGA. Our results confirm that general purpose microprocessors are not well suited to these tasks. Both DSP and FPGA achieve higher performance and/or better cost/performance ratios at the expense of lesser generality and a more complicated development cycle. The porting of the algorithms to DSP and FPGA requires about the same amount of work, whereby the cost/performance ratio of the reconfigurable FPGA solution is very attractive.