Evaluating mobile SOCs as an energy efficient DSP platform

Mobile system-on-chip (SOC) technology is improving at a staggering rate spurred primarily by the adoption of smartphones. This rapid innovation has allowed the mobile SOC to be considered in everything from high performance computing to embedded applications. In this paper, modern SOCs are evaluated for their use in digital signal processing by exploring implementation details on smartphones and tablets running the Android operating system. In addition, Google´s RenderScript Compute is leveraged to utilize CPU resources alongside other compute resources such as graphics processing units and digital signal processors. In order to benchmark these concepts several implementations of the discrete Fourier transform are tested across devices and input sizes. The results show both improvement in performance and energy efficiency on many devices compared to traditional Java implementations and show that the mobile SOC is a relevant platform for digital signal processing applications.