Toward the end of 2011, the folks from Altera announced theindustry's first OpenCL program for FPGAs (Clickhere to see that announcement).
Now, they say that goHDR,one of their early customers in the OpenCL for FPGAs program, achieved asignificant reduction in development time and a dramatic increase inperformance leveraging Altera's OpenCL for FPGAs. Working closely with Altera,goHDR ported its proprietary C-code to the OpenCL standard and implemented thecode in an FPGA in less than a week -- a process that typically requires threeto six months using a traditional HDL flow.
Combining Altera's expertise in FPGA technology and goHDR'sin-depth high-dynamic range (HDR) knowledge, the two companies leveraged OpenCLas a common language which allowed goHDR to rapidly develop an HDR-enabledtelevision solution. The solution implements goHDR's proprietary video codecalgorithm into an Altera FPGA, enabling existing televisions to display HDR videocontent at real time rates -- at least 30 frames per second. By using theOpenCL standard, goHDR was able to work entirely in a C-level environment andquickly perform multiple design iterations on their FPGA design.
"HDR video has very large data and computationalrequirements, creating significant challenges for video processing on suchplatforms as televisions or set-top boxes. FPGAs offer a very compelling alternativeto traditional multicore CPUs and GPUs, but we were not experienced VHDLprogrammers," said Alan Chalmers, innovation director at goHDR."Altera's OpenCL solution was a great fit for our HDR televisionapplications, making them very easy to implement. Working with Altera's OpenCLfor FPGAs program, we were able to get our system up and running in less than aweek and meet our project's performance requirements with a limited amount ofdevelopment time."
goHDR provides advanced data compression algorithms tocustomers developing HDR technology. The encoding/decoding software developedby goHDR enables the adoption of HDR video across many sectors, including filmand television, computer games, security and mobile devices.
Altera launched its OpenCL for FPGAs program in November2011. As part of the program, Altera initiated work with early customers,academia, and standards groups to define and develop an OpenCL for FPGAssolution. OpenCL for FPGAs combines the OpenCL parallel programming languagewith the parallel performance capabilities of FPGAs to deliver significantlyhigher performance compared to multi-core CPUs and CPU/GPU-based systems andshorter development times.
"With our OpenCL for FPGAs program, we make it significantlyeasier for designers to accelerate their designs with FPGAs," said AlexGrbic, director of marketing for software, DSP and IP at Altera. "OpenCLfor FPGAs delivers a significant productivity advantage to designers who havetraditionally modeled their algorithms in C and converted them to HDL. AnOpenCL solution for FPGAs further drives adoption of FPGAs in a variety ofmarkets, including military, medical, computer, and broadcast."
To see online learning materials on Altera's OpenCL program,including a video and a white paper, or to register to receive additionalinformation on Altera's OpenCL program visitthis page.
This story was originally posted by EETimes.
