Sandbridge Technologies, Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company that sells multi-core chips targeting mobile 3G and 4G baseband and multimedia processing. The SB3500 chip includes three DSP cores along with an ARM core; each of the DSP cores supports four-way multithreading and 16-way SIMD operations. The SB3500 is implemented in a 65 nm process, and is available with the DSP cores running at either 500 or 600 MHz. The 500 MHz chip costs $25 in 1K quantities; pricing for the 600 MHz chip has not yet been disclosed.
BDTI evaluated the SB3500’s performance using the BDTI Communications (OFDM) Benchmark. This benchmark is an application-oriented benchmark based on a simplified orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) receiver, as shown in the block diagram below. The SB3500 benchmark implementation uses a combination of C and assembly code.
