Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) systems that are used to create high-resolution radar images from low-resolution aperture data require high computational performance. Manycore architectures are emerging to overcome the computational requirements of the complex radar signal processing.

In this paper, we evaluate a manycore architecture namely Epiphany by implementing two significantly large case studies of fast factorized back-projection and autofocus criterion calculation, which are key components in modern synthetic aperture radar systems. The implementation results from the two case studies are compared on the basis of utilized resources and performance. The Epiphany implementations demonstrate the usefulness of the architecture for the streaming algorithm (autofocus criterion calculation) by achieving speedup of 8.9x with respect to the sequential implementation on Intel Core i7 processor while operating at a lower clock speed. On the other hand, for the memory-intensive algorithm (fast factorized back-projection), the Epiphany architecture shows moderate speedup in the order of 4.25x. The Epiphany implementations of the two algorithms are, respectively, 38x and 78x more energy-efficient.