Level-3 BLAS on the TI C6678 Multi-core DSP

Abstract

Digital Signal Processors (DSP) are commonly employed in embedded systems. The increase of processing needs in cellular base-stations, radio controllers and industrial/medical imaging systems, has led to the development of multi-core DSPs as well as inclusion of floating point operations while maintaining low power dissipation. The eight-core DSP from Texas Instruments, codenamed TMS320C6678, provides a peak performance of 128 GFLOPS (single precision) and an effective 32 GFLOPS(double precision) for only 10 watts. In this paper, we present the first complete implementation and report performance of the Level-3 Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms(BLAS) routines for this DSP. These routines are first optimized for single core and then parallelized over the different cores using OpenMP constructs. The results show that we can achieve about 8 single precision GFLOPS/watt and 2.2double precision GFLOPS/watt for General Matrix-Matrix multiplication (GEMM). The performance of the rest of theLevel-3 BLAS routines is within 90% of the corresponding GEMM routines.