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FPGA
2004
ACM

A quantitative analysis of the speedup factors of FPGAs over processors

14 years 6 months ago
A quantitative analysis of the speedup factors of FPGAs over processors
The speedup over a microprocessor that can be achieved by implementing some programs on an FPGA has been extensively reported. This paper presents an analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, at the architecture level of the components of this speedup. Obviously, the spatial parallelism that can be exploited on the FPGA is a big component. By itself, however, it does not account for the whole speedup. In this paper we experimentally analyze the remaining components of the speedup. We compare the performance of image processing application programs executing in hardware on a Xilinx Virtex E2000 FPGA to that on three general-purpose processor platforms: MIPS, Pentium III and VLIW. The question we set out to answer is what is the inherent advantage of a hardware implementation over a von Neumann platform. On the one hand, the clock frequency of general-purpose processors is about 20 times that of typical FPGA implementations. On the other hand, the iteration level parallelism on the F...
Zhi Guo, Walid A. Najjar, Frank Vahid, Kees A. Vis
Added 01 Jul 2010
Updated 01 Jul 2010
Type Conference
Year 2004
Where FPGA
Authors Zhi Guo, Walid A. Najjar, Frank Vahid, Kees A. Vissers
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