CETC released the “Soul Core II—A” chip: 100 billion floating point operations per second, and the actual computing performance is the strongest in the industry (24 April)
On April 23, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC) Institute 38, during the first Digital China Construction Summit held in Fuzhou, released the “Soulcore II—A”, the most powerful digital signal processor in the industry. The chip is completely designed by CETC Institute 38. It can perform 100 billion floating-point operation calculations in one second. The single-core performance exceeds the performance of similar chips on the international market by 4 times.
High-performance chips are known as "industrial food and grass" and represent a national level of information technology. All along, China has always relied on imports for high-performance digital signal processors (DSPs). Twelve years ago, the CETC Institute 38 began to enter the field of digital signal processor chips. In 2012, the Institute introduced the first practical high-performance floating-point general-purpose DSP chip independently developed by China—“Soulcore One”, which is 4-6 times higher than similar DSP chips of the same period, and successfully applied in China’s aviation police. The Airmarine-500 Early-Warning Radar and other defense technology equipment products have applied China's first high-end autonomous digital signal processor, which is widely used in defense technology equipment.
“Soulcore II—A” adopts a full-autonomous system architecture. The research and development lasted for 6 years, breaking many technical problems such as controller design, obtaining more than 30 scientific and technological achievements such as national technological invention patents and software copyrights, and possessing the strongest performance in the industry at the moment. The DSP core has exceeded the performance indicators of similar products at home and abroad. Compared to "Soul Core One," the performance of "Soul Core II—A" has increased sixfold. Through single-core multi-core, extended computing components, and upgraded instruction systems, the device performance has achieved 100 billion floating-point operations at the same time. Relatively good application environment and debugging methods; single-core implementation of 1024-point floating-point FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) operation requires only 1.6 microseconds, and its computational performance is three times higher than that of Texas Instruments TMS320C6678, and its actual performance is 1.7 times. Throughput is 240 Gb/s.
As a general-purpose DSP processor, "Soul Core II—A" will be widely used in high-intensity computing such as Radar, Electronic Countermeasures, communications, image processing, medical electronics, and industrial robots. At present, it is being used in a variety of major equipment and image processing fields.
According to Hong Yi, the chief scientist of the China Electronics Engineering and chief designer of "Soul Core II—A", the launch of that DSP chip makes the software radio moving from ideal to reality. The function of the chip gradually depends on the update of software algorithms. It lays a solid foundation for the establishment of an independent system high-end DSP product lineage in China.
