SpursEngine development environment for hardware/software uncovered　- No SPE coding knowledge required -
SpursEngine development environment for hardware/software uncovered
- No SPE coding knowledge required -
At the SpursEngine Developers Forum 2008 held on Friday, July 2008, Toshiba uncovered the SpursEngine Reference Kit (or SRK) and programming techniques to utilize the processor. SpursEngine is a multi-core, stream processor developed by Toshiba, inheriting Cell/B.E.'s design assets. It is equipped in Qosmio, their AV notebook PC, that the company began shipping in this July. The SRK is targeted towards engineers who develop SpursEngine-equipped products or the software. Toshiba says the kit allows the users to reduce development costs and cycle time.
The SRK is composed of hardware development kit and software development environment. The former consists of schematics, PCB layout, Gerber data, and design guides. The latter consists of basic software, application software, development tools, and sample programs.
The reference board, equipped with a SpursEngine SE1000 chip, is inserted within a general desktop PC for use. The interface is PCI Express (*1). As the local memory, 128M-byte XDR DRAM is employed on the board. The physical dimension of the board is 111.15 mm x 167.65 mm x 1.57 mm. "We will provide the users with design information of the SE1000 reference board such as the datasheet, schematics, or BOM (Bill of Materials) upon request," says Mr. Hamaoka of System LSI Division, Toshiba Semiconductor Company (Figure 1). "Based on such information, the users can manufacture SpursEngine-equipped products without any circuit or layout design implementation."
Two-way programming methodology available
Toshiba Semiconductor Company has prepared basic software, application software, and SPE software development tools as the software development environment. The basic software offers device driver for Windows and a command interpreter from host PC and SPEs. The application software provides sample programs as host application, middleware that allows to use SE1000's video processing functions from host applications, and basic software interface library that allows to use SE1000's basic software from application software. SPE software development tools include SPE IDE, SPE tool chain, SPE program debugger, and performance monitor.
The programming methodology for SpursEngine is roughly divided to two ways. The first method is that the application program uses the middleware, through the API, such as video codec, face recognition, or hand gesture recognition prepared for SE1000. The second is that the user develops the SPE program directly.
In the former case, the user can use the functions prepared by Toshiba via API, so "you can take advantage of SpursEngine's high performance even though you know nothing about SPE," says Mr. Abe, Solution Service Division at Fixstars, who explained the software development kit (Figure 2). The development environment for the host program is Microsoft's Visual Studio.
As for the latter, the user would want to achieve differentiation by developing a unique program, so he develops the SPE program by himself. In this case, the user transfers SPE program and data for processing from the host CPU to the SPEs using the basic software interface library.
The API of the basic software interface library includes: "SpursStream" that performs transferring the stream data between the host and SPEs; "SPHA" that executes the commands of SE1000 firmware used in the host program; and "SPSA" that executes the commands of SE1000 firmware used in the SPE program. The software development environment for SPE is Eclipse.
At this Forum, for the first time, such details of the SpursEngine programming methodology were publicly unveiled. Toshiba is planning to further streamline the programming environment for SpursEngine, cooperating with the member companies in SpursEngine Partners.