A year goes by ...

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BruceNaylor
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Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Sep 07, 2010 5:46 pm
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A year goes by ...

Post by BruceNaylor »

Just joined, and noticed that it's been a year since the last post - not very active huh.

I've developed a range of products based on Micron and Onmivision CMOS sensors that squirt uncompressed video through Cypress USB2.0 silicon to PC's for further processing, and have been looking around for some time at how to bolt an embedded system together.

Over the last few years I've played with Embedded Linux and Win CE, and invested loads of time on FPGA's, but to be truthful I've not got as far down the road as I had hoped. Other paying projects always seem to drag me away from the fun stuff.

Initially I'm looking at doing some processing straight from the sensor at 10, 12 or 14bit wide, performing some spatial noise reduction, maybe a little edge detection, and then quirting the data onto a CE platform for end-user analysis. Further down the line I need real processing to build 3D models from Z-stacks - very doable on a modern quad core with parallel threads, but in an embedded environment?

The multi-core, multi-thread, C based, fast time to market is what caught my eye with XMOS.

So is XMOS hardware the way to go, or should I stick with working on an FPGA solution?

All constructive advise welcome

Bruce.


BruceNaylor
Junior Member
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Sep 07, 2010 5:46 pm
Contact:

Post by BruceNaylor »

Ah, sorry, though I was posting this to the Video group

Apologies.

Bruce.
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shawn
XCore Addict
Posts: 238
Joined: Thu Dec 17, 2009 5:15 am

Post by shawn »

I haven't posted barely at all this lat summer cause I've been so busy on my project.
If you instantiate a cpu core within an FPGA you take a performance hit.
If you host a CPU next to an FPGA, you have to deal with the cpu abstractions any
cache coherency memory sharing schemes. The XMOS model is very raw core with an
excellent performance to power ratio, making it an excellent choice to hoist dsp's, fpga's
ect... There are a few softcores floating around the web of the old Transputer. So if one wants
to instantiate an INMOS core and run OCCAM (father of XC). Its been done all ready. Note
the similarity between XC and OCCAM breath's life into 25 years or so of software development
for the CSP model of computing. :)
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