Embedded signal processing is facing the challenges of increased performance as well as to achieve energy efficiency. Massively parallel processor arrays (MPPAs) consisting of tens or hundreds of processing cores offer the possibility of meeting the growing performance demand in an energy efficient way by exploiting parallelism instead of scaling the clock frequency of a single powerful processor.

In this paper, we evaluate two variants of MPPAs by implementing a significantly large case study, namely an autofocus criterion calculation, which is a key component in modern synthetic aperture radar systems. The implementation results from the two target architectures are compared on the basis of utilized resources, performance, and energy efficiency. The Ambric implementations demonstrate the usefulness of occam-pi based high-level language approach in utilizing hundreds of processors, whereas the Epiphany implementation reveals that energy-efficiency can be improved even further by a factors of 2-3 with respect to the Ambric implementations and can be achieved at high clock speeds. © 2013 IEEE.