DSPstone
DSP Compiler and Processor Evaluation - DSPstone
How good are Compilers for DSP-architectures ?
This was the question in 1995 when we started to measure the performance of commercial available DSP-compilers. The performance was measured in such a way that the code produced by the compiler was compared to hand-written assembly code.
The difference between theses two implementations is measured in terms of code-size and execution time. This was done for several architectures in order to gain information about the abilities of the compilers to address certain features of the architecture.
Having a look at the Analog Devices DSP we clearly see that the handwritten assembly code almost outperforms the code produced by the compiler. The execution of the compiler generated code takes 8 times longer than the one written by hand. The code size also is significantly larger. This means if you develop your application with such a compiler you'll have to take a much faster DSP, spend more money for external memory. As a result nearly all time-critical applications are implemented by hand. Some of the reasons why DSP-Compilers are so bad are:
- unability to use machine idioms (MAC-operation)
- unability to make use of certain architectural features (zero overhead loops)
- unability to make use of possible instruction level parallelism
Most of the DSP-compilers are based on GPP-(general purpose-processor) compilers. Therefore the results are not very surprising.
Download the official DSP-Stone sources and theDSP-Stone report here. Updated sources for the TI TMS320C54x are available, too.
Projects of the Group on DSP Tools

Publications
Willems, M., Zivojnovic, V. and Meyr, H.:
DSP-Compiler: Produktqualität für kontrolldominierte Applikationen?,
in Proceedings of DSP Deutschland 96,
pp.
49-56,
Oct. 1996
Willems, M. and Zivojnovic, V.:
DSP-Compiler: Product Quality for Control-Dominated Applications?,
in
Proc. Int. Conf. on Signal Processing Application and Technology (ICSPAT)(Boston),
pp.
752-756,
Oct. 1996
Willems, M., Warmers, M. and Zivojnovic, V.:
DSP-Compiler: auf dem Weg zum Produktionstool ?,
in Design & Elektronik,
No. 24/25,
pp.
47-48,
Dec. 1995
Zivojnovic, V., Schraut, H., Willems, M. and Schoenen, R.:
DSPs, GPPs, and multimedia applications: An evaluation using DSPstone,
in
Proc. Int. Conf. on Signal Processing Application and Technology (ICSPAT)(Boston),
Oct. 1995
Willems, M., Jersak, M. and Zivojnovic, V.:
DSP-bezogene Spracherweiterungen: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen,
in Proc. of DSP Deutschland 95, München,
pp.
100-110,
Oct. 1995
Zivojnovic, V., Martinez, J., Schläger, C. and Meyr, H.:
DSPstone: A DSP-Oriented Benchmarking Methodology,
in
Proc. of ICSPAT'94 - Dallas,
Oct. 1994