2.1. C7000 Digital Signal Processor CPU Architecture

The C7000 CPU DSP architecture is the latest high-performance digital signal processor (DSP) from Texas Instruments. It is featured in some Texas Instruments Keystone 3 devices. This Very-Long-Instruction-Word (VLIW) DSP has significant mathematical processing capabilities, due to its wide vector instructions and multiple functional units. This optimization guide can help developers get the most performance of the C7000 DSPs.

When integrated into a larger TI device, such as some Keystone 3 devices, the C7000 is often paired with a Matrix Multiply Accelerator (MMA), which can significantly improve the performance of certain machine learning networks. We recommend use of the TI Deep Learning library, which has been optimized to use the Matrix Multiply Accelerator. The TI Deep Learning library is part of the Processor SDK.

The C7000 DSP has vector (SIMD) instructions that are capable of performing up to 64 operations in a single instruction, depending on the data type and version of the C7000 CPU. Nearly all computational instructions on C7000 DSP cores are fully pipelined, which means independent instructions can be started on every clock cycle. This combination of vector instructions and pipelined behavior allows you to perform a large number of computations per cycle. The C7000 DSP cores feature both fixed-point and floating-point vector instructions.

Each C7000 DSP core has several functional units. On each clock cycle, each functional unit can be executing an independent instruction. Because the C7000 DSP cores have 13 fully-pipelined functional units, up to 13 instructions can start executtion on every clock cycle. In reality, some of the functional units are specialized for certain kinds of instructions, so for this and other reasons, it is common that not all 13 functional units execute an instruction every cycle.

For more information on the C7000 instruction set, please see the C71x DSP CPU, Instruction Set, and Matrix Multiply Accelerator Technical Reference Manual (SPRUIP0), which can be obtained through your TI Field Application Engineer.