Re: FPGA-based hardware accelerator for PC

Jeremy Ralph wrote:

If one wanted to develop an FPGA-based hardware accelerator that could
attach to the average PC to process data stored in PC memory what
options are there available.

What could it accelerate? Modern PCs are quite fast beasts...
If you couldn't speed things up by a factor of, say, 300%, your
device would be useless. Modest improvements by several tens
of percents can be neglected -- Moore's law constantly works
for you. FPGAs are good for special-purpose tasks, but there
are not many such tasks in the realm of PCs.

+ ability to instantiate a 32 bit RISC (or equiv)

You already have a high-performance CPU on board, why do you
need another one? Use your FPGA to do something massively parallel
and let the CPU perform the CPU-ish stuff. The high rank Xilinx
devices contain one or more PowerPCs for that purpose and that
solution seems to be the best possible.

Also, what is the best way to move data between PC mem to FPGA? DMA?

DMA is good, there are PCI frontend IP cores available.

What transfer rates should one realistically expect?

132MiB/s when not overclocked.

Best regards
Piotr Wyderski

.

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