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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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11 years ago

Performance of FPGA vs FPGA with SOC

Hi I am deciding on a FPGA for image processing purposes and I would like to know the difference in performance between a FPGA and a FPGA soc.

Will a stand along FPGA be faster than FPGA soc? Or does it depend on the application. Can I achieve the same bandwidth with either FPGA or FPGA soc?

Thank you

Ritesh

2 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    Its a very vague question.

    The key question is the algorithm. Is it suited to a SOC, or an FPGA?
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    The SoCs have the same fabric as the non-SoC counterparts, the only difference is some of the FPGA resources are replaced with a system on chip a hard silicon processor block implementation. Some algorithms belong in dedicated hardware and some fit well into a standard processing system. For example if I had a dataplane application I would probably keep that in FPGA logic, but if there was a lot of initialization, control, analytics, etc... you can often use a processor for stuff like that and that's where the SoC devices would be appropriate since you can use the same die for both parts of the product.