Cadence announced the Cadence Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP IP, the sixth generation of its highly successful HiFi DSP family, based on a new architecture purpose-built for next-generation voice AI and emerging immersive audio. As these applications proliferate in the home entertainment, automotive infotainment and smartphone markets, the HiFi iQ DSP delivers the performance and energy efficiency required to meet growing SoC computational demands. Compared to the industry-leading Tensilica HiFi 5s DSP, the HiFiiQ DSP offers 2X greater compute performance, 8X higher AI performance and more than 25% energy savings for most workloads--delivering over 40% performance uplift on numerous audio codecs.

A number of factors are driving the need for greater computation, including the need for richer experiences enabled by the latest immersive audio codecs, audio processing at higher sampling rates, object-based rendering, seamless natural language processing (NLP), and automotive road-noise cancellation (RNC). Since most of these designs are power constrained, increasing the core's operating frequency or integrating multiple cores is often not a viable option. Leveraging more than two decades developing audio solutions and expertise in instruction-set optimization, Cadence has developed a new architecture specifically designed for AI-enhanced, high-performance audio workloads.

The Tensilica HiFi iQ DSP addresses the latest audio market trends, delivering significant improvements over the Tensilica HiFi 5's DSP: 2X greater raw compute performance and 8X higher AI performance for compute-intensive advanced audio standards; More than 25% energy savings across various workloads for very energy-efficient on-device AI processing; Enhanced auto-vectorization for easy programming and fast time to market; Integrated support for FP8, BF16 and other formats to run cutting-edge voice AI models; The Tensilica HiFiiQ DSP's architectural enhancements and increased computational capability enable sophisticated immersive audio codecs such as Dolby MS12, E clipsa Audio, Opus HD, Audio Vivid and others to run with higher efficiency than on previous HiFi DSPs. The TensilicaHiFi iQ DSP is compatible with the Cadence NeuroWeave Software Development Kit (SDK), TensorFlowite for Micro (TFLM), LiteRT and ExecuTorch environments for AI model execution. The Tensilica HiQ DSP also leverages the vast ecosystem of partners and OEMs that have developed software libraries, compilers, codec packages, frameworks and more to enable easy deployment and fast time to market.