DSP Performance Capability Advantages of Stratix III FPGAs Over Virtex-5
FPGAs are the ideal platform for implementing the highest performance digital signal processing (DSP) applications. With the new Stratix® III FPGA family, Altera has taken DSP performance capability to a new level. Not only do the Stratix III FPGAs offer up to 62x the raw DSP horsepower advertised by the highest end C64x programmable DSP family from Texas Instruments, but they also offer significant DSP advantages over the competing Virtex-5 device family from Xilinx.
There are various ways to compare DSP performance capability. The most widely-used methodology is to compare the number of 18x18 multiplier resources available (as shown in Figure 1). These multipliers are commonly deployed to implement fixed-point DSP algorithms.
When you compare the generic-logic variant devices of the Stratix III FPGA family against the competing Virtex-5 family, you find that the Stratix III FPGAs offer 3 to 6 times the amount of multiplier resources for fixed-point DSP implementation—the most common form of DSP algorithms implemented in FPGAs today.
Figure 1. 18 x 18 Multiplier Resources in Competing Generic-Logic Devices
When it comes to the DSP-enhanced variants, the story remains the same. As shown in Figure 2, for the common fixed-point DSP implementation Stratix III DSP-enhanced devices provide 1.5 to 2.5 times the number of multiplier resources when compared with corresponding Virtex-5 devices.
Figure 2. 18 x 18 Multiplier Resources in Competing DSP-Enhanced Logic Devices
With the availability of so many multiplier resources, you can often implement the same algorithm in a much smaller device or, alternatively, fit an order of magnitude more channels in the same size device when implementing wireless processing.
Xilinx only offers three device members in their DSP optimized Virtex-5 family, with the highest density topping off at a mere 59 K 6-input look-up tables (LUTs), which are equivalent to 33 K adaptive logic modules (ALMs). Altera's largest DSP-enhanced device is almost three times larger at 102K ALMs as shown in Figure 3.
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