Traditionally audio Digital Signal Processing developers think of using only traditional Digital Signal Processors - but there is some surprising benchmark results with what can be done with the Cortex-A application processors as well as the Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M7s. Becoming aware of all these plus knowing exactly how much processing power your application needs will more accurately help with finding the best processor and reducing BOM costs.
Audio Weaver platform can help with accurately benchmarking a complete audio chain. Why is benchmarking a real design on a dev board important? Unlike the MCUs, cache memory plays an important unpredictable behavior on the Cortex-As. So it is important to be able to actually benchmark already optimized DSP code on the actual board.
For this reason, Audio Weaver by DSP Concepts can save the traditional DSP development time by 90%. Prototype and development can be done prior to hardware readiness on a dev board, the design and code is production and target ready, and real time tuning can be done in the form factor so that there's no need to re-write and re-iterate coding to fit processor footprint.
Below is the presentation given at the AES (Audio Engineering Society) 2014 conference in Los Angeles by pbeckmann, founder of DSP Concepts.
View presentation
Maybe pbeckmann can answer to the specifics. But I know think some device makers are making the M7 chips pin comparable with M4 so that you can replace it directly, just running more efficiently. Maybe automatically takes care of these?