What is the difference between a standard microprocessor and a DSP processor?

Some newbie questions...

1. What is the difference between a standard microprocessor and a DSP processor? the only concept that in my head is a DSP processor can do MAC(multiply and accumulate) in 1 instruction while the regular processor cannot.

2. Which is the suitable DSP(development kit) to start with for a newbie?

3. What is the fundamental concept/project (e.g. in learning C, you do "printf" at the begining) that one must go through in learning DSP processor?

Any comments and suggestions please...

DSP and uC

Hi
DSPs are processors therefor they need some circuits to run. MCUs have port, timer, counter, serial interfaces and so on.
DSPs are faster and have optimal instructions.
if you want to work with DSP first learn digital signal processing.

Re: DSP and uC

in DSP there are array processing and thats why they execute dsp alogos faster
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DSP and uC

yes DSP processors are optimized for MAC operations because that is the most frequent operation in DSP related tasks. in addition to that there are some more differences like circular buffers.

check for any floating point DSP development kit. the reason for suggesting a floating point DSP kit is that it is easy to start with floating point and you can also do fixed point operations on a floating point DSP. but floating point DSPs are very expensive as compared to fixed point DSPs.

once you buy a kit (or get one from someone) and install the software associated with that kit you will find alot of examples to start with. if you buy an analog DSP based kit you will find some examples in the VisualDSP++ examples folder and simillarly you can find a number of examples for TI's Code Composer Studio if you have a TI based kit.

while learning C for a PC you start with a "hello world" program but with a DSP kit you cant just plug in a monitor to some port and display "hello world" on it. usually the first example to try out is serial data communication with the built-in UART. but you can do anything you like.

Re: DSP and uC

HI,
Following links should give some help for ur queries...

"Micrprocessors Vs DSPs" : **broken link removed**

“Choosing a DSP Processor”:
**broken link removed**

Also u can check out some other related articles : https://www.bdti.com/articles/info_articles.htm


~R

Re: DSP and uC

karnhwa said:

Some newbie questions...

1. What is the difference between a standard microprocessor and a DSP processor? the only concept that in my head is a DSP processor can do MAC(multiply and accumulate) in 1 instruction while the regular processor cannot.

.

Click to expand...

hi,

hope this paper can help..

Re: DSP and uC

hi
uc doing processing in sequence weras dsp up doing parralel processing
that means excution of fatch, decode,excess & excute is done simulteeaniously.

so dsp up has more processing power then genral up eventhough clock freq is same.

hope this helps