Adapteva’s Epiphany Floating Point Processor Core: A Leading-Edge Lithography May Finally Open Doors

(BDTI): Cost- and power consumption-sensitive digital signal processing applications tend to leverage fixed point processors, for a common fundamental reason: fixed-point processor cores are substantially less complex than their floating-point counterparts, leading to reductions in transistor count and silicon area. Yet fixed-point processing comes with trade-offs of its own; code development, for example, is complicated by the need to comprehend the potential for overflow, underflow and round-off errors. And floating-point processors also tend to support wider data words and are therefore inherently capable of higher dynamic range. FULL ARTICLE