What supporting software/libraries do we have for QorIQ ?

[Maciek]

Hi,

I'm new to QorIQ. I'm looking for parts with big floating-point computational capabilities. Comparable to 2-4 core TI C6000 DSP processors.

I was looking for a while and it seems that QorIQ may be a good choice. So I have 2 questions:

1. Are there other (better) choices in Freescale portfolio than QorIQ - for computationally intensive tasks (single and double precision floating point computations) ?

2. We have CodeWarrior Professional licenses in the company. What run-time software (like operating systems...), libraries, configuration/initialization tools etc. do we have available at no additional cost ?

I see that there are PE tools, Linux SDK etc. but it's not clear what is available now and what should be bought ? What can we buy additionally ?

Thanks for help

Maciek

[yipingwang · Accepted solution]

1. You could refer to QorIQ P1 and P2 series with e500v2 cores, which provide Signal Processing Engine(SPE).The SPE is designed to accelerate signal-processing applications normally suited to DSP operation. It is accomplished using short(two-element) vectors within 64 bit GPRs and using single instruction multiple data(SIMD) operations to perform the requisite computations. An accumulator register (ACC) allows back-to-back operations without loop unrolling.

SPE is a pipelined engine. It can execute several instructions at the same time (on different stages).

SPE double precision floating-point instruction latencies are 6:1 (6 clocks to get result, 1 result can be issued per clock). Divide is not pipelined and require 32 clocks.SPE single precision scalar and vector floating-point instruction latencies are 4:1 ( divide 29 clocks). So, vector operation can issue 2 results per clock.

SPE loses DSP because it doesn't provide parallel address manipulation and operand transfer. SPE can perform calculations very fast (1 DPFP/clock or 2 SPFP/clock) if the operands are already in the general purpose registers. In fact, operands have to be fetched from external memory into registers and result stored to the memory (typically two loads and one store per MAC). this essentially reduces performance of DSP algorithms.

2. Except CodeWarrior(need to purchase license), you could register and download the following Tools and Softwares for free from Freescale Public Website.

QCS(QorIQ Configuration Suite) is designed to simplify the configurations of QorIQ devices, it could be downloaded from PE_QORIQ_SUITE: Processor Expert Software: QorIQ Configuration Suite.

Linux SDK includes Linux Kernel and device driver, u-boot, application, libraries, GNU tools, Yocto build tools and deployment mechanisms, which could be downloaded from SDKLINUX: Linux® SDK for QorIQ Processors.

NetComm Software could be used for Non OS system development, it is a big device drivers package, which could be downloaded from NetComm_Software: NetComm Software Resources.

Have a great day,
Yiping Wang

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[Maciek]

Thanks for detailed answer.

Regards

Maciek