Chapter 11. The Diamond 330HiFi audio DSP Core

Elwood : What kind of music do you usually have here? Claire : Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.

—The Blues Brothers, 1980

The Diamond 330HiFi audio DSP core is a high-performance, 2-way superscalar RISC CPU core that has been optimized for recording, encoding, decoding, and playing music and other audio files. Like the Diamond 570T CPU core described in Chapter 10, the term superscalar as applied to the Diamond 330HiFi core describes a processor that achieves superlative performance by executing multiple scalar instructions per clock cycle. The Diamond 330HiFi DSP core’s two superscalar execution pipelines and 64-bit FLIX-format instructions allow the processor to break the 1-instruction-per-clock barrier. The processor’s architecture has been sculpted specifically to optimally run audio codecs (coders/decoders) in the fewest possible clock cycles to achieve the lowest possible operating power. Several codecs for widely used digital-audio formats are available from Tensilica.