Forum Discussion

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

OpenCL licensing

Hi,

We are looking into evaluating Alter's OpenCL support currently.

However, once we complete our design based on OpenCL, I wonder:

- Will we be able to run our code on custom boards integrated into our products using a CycloneV SoC?

In this case the aoc compiler can't know about the board used.

- Is it possible to combine OpenCL kernels with "normal" VHDL code in a single image.

While we prefer to write our compute kernels with OpenCL, low-level interfaces to external devices would require VHDL.

- What licensing options are available? What additional costs will arise from the fact we are using OpenCL instead of VHDL?

For now it seems the license is bound to the fpga-board, right?

Thank you in advance, Clemens

1 Reply

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

    For the first two I recommend contacting your Altera rep they can give you a more "official" answer than I can. For the 3rd one I'm not 100% sure about this but I don't think the license is bound to the board, it's bound to the SDK as far as I know. So for example if you had a license I think you can use any board you want that supports OpenCL. I'm not sure about the details of the license like the length of validity, deployment, etc... but I don't think it would be any different than say Quartus II, but I would check with your Altera rep to make sure.