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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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8 years ago

FPGA power consumption

Hey guys, I'm doing a comparison of performance of FPGAs and GPUs, right now I'm looking at the power consumption part. So I use the PowerMonitor.exe provided by Arria10 package, and the power doe...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
8 years ago

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The power consumption will definitely change during computation; however, your kernel might be too fast/short for the reading to show up, or the the provided power monitor might not actually work correctly. I have written my own power measurement functions for non-reference boards based on the manufacturers' API, and I have seen differences up to 30 Watts between idle (but configured) and computing states on the FPGA.

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Hi HRZ

Thanks for the reply. I read your paper on Evaluating and Optimizing OpenCL Kernels for High Performance Computing with FPGAs, it has been really helpful.

In the paper, the power measurements you gave include everything like on-board memory, so you are not subtracting the idle power from computing states power right?

Thanks.