OpenCL + Cyclone V SoC

So, many of the questions you are asking are valid, but I want to make some clarifications.

Yes, C2H is gone and OpenCL is NOT C to gates. You are right it is a higher level coding language than HDL, but its intention is not to produce HDL code that can be incorporated into an FPGA (that is something that is coming as a new front end to our current flow). It is intended to allow a programmer the ability to take an algorithm in C or CUDA and easily implement it in an FPGA to achieve system level acceleration of that algorithm. It abstracts away the low level HDL coding language and tool flow and allows parallelism to be extracted from OpenCL C code.

SoC is available in 13.1 of Altera's tools. It is a customer beta feature that requires a patch to fix a couple of things in the compiler for Linux, but allows a programmer to profile their inner loops and functions they want to accelerate and push those onto the FPGA fabric without having to learn HDL. IN this case, it is real time acceleration vs system acceleration. Altera abstracts away not only the HDL flow, but also the ARM flow too. The Altera SDK for OpenCL produces both the ARM host and the FPGA accelerator image in one step. I am about to release a new webex that goes over the SoC implementation on the Altera OpenCL page.

If you want the code to the Raytracing demo, it is available upon request. You just have to contact your local Altera FAE and he can request it from me, and I will distribute it. It is nothing fancy, just showing single chip host and FPGA accelerator solution. It is a demo more than a design example. There is a design example page on the Altera.com OpenCL page that has a lot more interesting things to play with. There is also a facial detection design example that will be released this week or next, that we used at SC13 a few weeks ago and is kinda cool (but wont run on SoC)

Altera SDK for OpenCL requires a license that also has to be requested through an Altera sales or FAE rep. You can get a 60 day eval license to play with it, but will need a board to compile for and run on. Also on the Altera.com OpenCL page is a link to our supported board vendors that have COTS boards that can be purchased and used. The Arrow SoCKit board support package is still undergoing the approval processes to be a OpenCL supported board, but the raytracing demo has already been ported to it by Arrow. Be aware that the Cyclone V SoC is not a large part and real time acceleration of simple functions will be possible compared to a non SoC part which is scalable.