Chapter 12. The Diamond 545CK DSP Core

...the 545CK has powerful DSP extensions that push it past every licensable processor core ever benchmarked by Berkeley Design Technology (BDTI).

—Tom Halfhill, Microprocessor Report

The Diamond 545CK vector DSP core is a high-performance, 3-way superscalar RISC CPU core that has been tailored to deliver very high performance on a wide range of DSP tasks. This DSP core is based on the Xtensa LX processor with a modified version of the Vectra LX vector DSP extensions and additional instructions that further enhance the core’s DSP performance. Other instructions add control over the core’s input- and output-queue interfaces. The Diamond 545CK DSP core’s three superscalar execution pipelines, dual 128-bit load/store units, and 64-bit FLIX-format instructions allow the processor to break the 1-instruction-per-clock barrier.