| jeremybennett | KeeWee1: It's a good question. I haven't looked at the Altera OpenCL toolkit. OpenCL is a language (C99 derived) and library API for controlling heterogenous GPU environments. | 11:14 |
|---|---|---|
| jeremybennett | I know Altera is looking to use OpenCL, but I don't understand whether it is to generate hardware to execute the language directly (very 1960s) or to generate code for networks of Altera processors. | 11:15 |
| jeremybennett | At present OpenRISC is single core, although Stefan Wallentowitz has been doing a lot of work on a multi-core variant at TUM, so it is not clear how OpenCL would help, unless on a chip with lots of other (Altera) processors. | 11:16 |
| jeremybennett | OpenCL is also LLVM based, while the OpenRISC tool chain is GNU based. If we are to use OpenCL seriously with OpenRISC, then we need LLVM for OpenRISC as well as multi-core OpenRISC. | 11:17 |
| stekern | speaking of which; what happened to the openrisc llvm effort? I know jonibo started out on it and someone was interested in following up, did anything really happen there? | 11:22 |
| KeeWee1 | jeremybennett: thank you for your comments | 11:25 |
| KeeWee1 | some precisions: Altera has 2 offers for the OpenCL target | 11:25 |
| KeeWee1 | 1 FPGA communicating over PCI Express 2.0 and 3.0, using the exact same protocol we have discussed with Olof at Fosdem | 11:26 |
| KeeWee1 | the second option offered by Altera is a SOC integrating FPGA, it is a hard core ARM with an FPGA on the same SOC | 11:27 |
| KeeWee1 | this second option avoid to copy the input/output buffer over PCIe, since the FPGA is able to access the memory managed by the hard core ARM on the same SOC | 11:27 |
| KeeWee1 | this second option looks very promising to create accelerators without the penalty to transfer memory content before starting the accelerator (the OpenCL kernel = the C function/module compiled as Verilog) | 11:28 |
| jeremybennett | Interesting. My only knowledge of what Altera were doing came from the Wikipedia page on OpenCL - you might like to expand that page with your knowledge. | 12:34 |
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