Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
12 years ago

OpenCL dev board

Hello

Looking at Altera's website, it would seem the OpenCL SDK is priced rather steeply, and only available for expensive PCIe boards. It seems to be targeted mostly at vertical markets.

Does Altera have any plans to make a "lite" version of the OpenCL SDK to run on cheaper boards, say the various Cyclone-based dev boards? This could capture the interest of a broader market, including hobbyist and computer professionals, interested in getting first-hand experience with parallel computing.

4 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    i have seen OpenCL designs run a Cyclone V SoC kit, but i'm not sure when that will be broadly available

    alternatively, there will be (or already is) a way to build an OpenCL "BSP" for custom boards (or non-officially supported devkits). i don't know when that will be available either

    i imagine there will be significant updates to OpenCL in the upcoming 13.1 release
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    If there is enough interest in this then I would expect OpenCL board manufactures to jump on board. Altera doesn't actually sell any OpenCL boards, instead OpenCL boards are designed and sold by third party board vendors.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    Yes, I know Altera is not selling any OpenCL boards... as per the current definition of an OpenCL board.

    What I was trying to say is that many hobbyists with a CS background, including me, are not taking the plunge and learning a full HDL, with all the skill set and know-how it requires, but we'd love to be able to program something like the Cyclone III Starter Kit for small projects, if we could do so in OpenCL.

    It's the same reason we love the Arduino, with its simple C API and easy to use IDE, much more so than if we had to study the original SDK of the actual microcontrollers. I hope I'm making sense.

    I just wanted to throw it out there. I'm looking forward to the future Arduino of FPGAs, as soon as somebody (maybe Altera?) will be able to make FPGAs universally programmable by people with little or no hardware design background.

    On the same vein, see this ACM article: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2443836
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    I expect this to happen over time but the main focus today is speed, speed, and more speed and the resources available on the low cost FPGAs make it difficult to achieve high throughput in a small hardware footprint. The technology relatively speaking is very new and advancing very quickly so I expect what you are looking for to become reality eventually but these types of jumps in technology take time.