Beyond Gbps Turbo Decoder on Multi-Core CPUs

International audienceThis paper presents a high-throughput implementation of a portable software turbo decoder. The code is optimized for traditional multi-core CPUs (like x86) and it is based on the Enhanced max-log-MAP turbo decoding variant. The code follows the LTE-Advanced specification. The key of the high performance comes from an inter-frame SIMD strategy combined with a fixed-point representation. Our results show that proposed multi-core CPU implementation of turbo-decoders is a challenging alternative to GPU implementation in terms of throughput and energy efficiency. On a high-end processor, our software turbo-decoder exceeds 1 Gbps information throughput for all rate-1/3 LTE codes with K < 4096