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hiratz's avatar
hiratz
Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
6 years ago

How much private and local memory are available in Intel FPGA (pac_a10)?

For the OpenCL development on Intel pac_a10 (arria 10) FPGA, what's the maximum available size of private memory and local memory respectively? Thanks
hiratz's avatar
hiratz
Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
6 years ago

I see. Thank you!

Could I clearly define a variable as a register one or Block RAM?

And does a register variable have a memory address? If so, a pointer to it can be passed to some function as the argument. In a traditional CPU architecture, a register variable has no "memory address".

HRZ's avatar
HRZ
Icon for Frequent Contributor rankFrequent Contributor
6 years ago

The decision of what resource to use for implementing buffers is directly made by the compiler. You can use the "__attribute__((register))" attribute in your buffer declaration to force buffers up to a certain size to be implemented using registers instead of Block RAM. However, there is a limit above which the compiler will refuse to perform this conversion and compilation will fail. It is usually best to leave the decision to the compiler.

There is no pointer for on-chip resources (be it register or Block RAM) and size of on-chip buffers must be known at compile-time. However, all on-chip buffers are addressable regardless of whether they are implemented using registers or Block RAM.