MIPS and SAI work together to demonstrate the performance benefits of multithreading for LTE systems

     MIPS Technologies, a leader in industry-standard processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking and mobile applications, and SAI Technology, a leader in secure wireless communications for the global mobile wireless market, today announced that When running SAI's LTE stack with MIPS multithreading technology on user end devices, performance improvements of more than 65% can be achieved for different data packet sizes. The results show that using two threads, or virtual processing units (Vpes), can significantly improve baseband processing efficiency in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets compared to a single thread.

     It is common practice for many smart connected devices today to adopt multi-core technology to achieve the required high performance and quality of service (QoS). However, multi-core design requires increased silicon area and power consumption. Therefore, many applications use multithreading as an alternative design approach that provides significant performance gains without significantly increasing wafer area and power consumption.

     In the demonstration, SAI leveraged its system-level expertise in mobile applications to figure out the best way to split the data plane and control plane in the LTE baseband protocol stack, which was assigned to the two virtual processors (i.e., threads) in the MIPS core for execution. According to the test results obtained by SAI on the hardware platform, in the complete analog mobile network environment to transmit three types of data (voice, video and data) traffic at the same time, SAI's protocol stack can well support the performance of CAT 1 to CAT 4 on single-core MIPS, and the wafer area and power consumption efficiency are very high.

     Gideon Intrater, Vice President of Technology Marketing at MIPS, said, "MIPS 'patented multithreading technology delivers clear performance benefits to multiple systems. This latest achievement demonstrates the benefits that multithreading technology provides for mobile devices, and we expect these benefits to extend to base station solutions as well, particularly in the rapidly growing field of micro cellular devices and Internet of Things (M2M) devices. "We are excited to partner with SAI to help customers with MIPS multithreading and SAI's LTE solutions develop better baseband processing capabilities."

     Dr. Venkat Rayapati, CEO of SAI Technologies, said: "Our complete solution complies with the latest LTE specifications, has completed interoperability testing and has been approved for use by major telecom vendors. By running our solution on MIPS multithreaded cores, we can achieve significant performance gains with little additional wafer area and power consumption. As multiple vendors invest in the development of the next generation of 4G mobile devices, this solution will provide significant differentiating features. At the same time, with this instantly available solution, manufacturers gain the advantage of reduced time to market."