VIA develops its own SSD controller

Tensilica announced today that VIA has selected Tensilica's Xtensa Data Processor (DPU) for its Solid State Drive (SSD) System-on-Chip (SoC) design. Through the appraisal of technical evaluation, VIA believes that Tensilica's DPU can provide four times more performance than its counterpart in key algorithms.

SSDs require faster and more efficient data management and processing to increase data throughput (IOPS per second of input/output operations). For traditional processors, performance is usually improved by increasing the clock frequency. However, this approach also increased power consumption and chip size, and in particular, dramatically increased frequencies, which forced designers to switch to more complex multi-core solutions.

Tensilica's DPUs provide designers with configurable IP cores, control and signal processing capabilities, and high-bandwidth interfaces that can increase performance without speeding up the clock frequency. For example, designers can use single-cycle bit-field processing instructions, arithmetic operation instructions, and parallel single-cycle table lookup instructions to achieve a computational efficiency that is more than 10 times that of comparable processors. This approach not only improves IOPS, but also significantly reduces the complexity of power consumption and SoC design itself.