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BittWare offers specially priced FPGA board for OpenCL development

Date: 14/01/2013
BittWare has announced that their S5-PCIe-HQ (S5PH-Q) PCIe COTS board populated with the Altera Stratix V GSMD5 device has been specially priced for use with Altera’s Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL. The S5PH-Q is a half-length PCIe card based on Altera’s high-performance 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs for high-performance network processing, signal processing, and data acquisition. The S5PH-Q GSMD5 is available now for Altera OpenCL Early Access Program (EAP) customers, along with BittWare’s BittWorks II Toolkit and Altera’s SDK for OpenCL, creating an ideal platform for Stratix V-based OpenCL development. Future Altera SDK support for BittWare’s S5PH-Q will include both the Altera Stratix V GSMD8 and GXMA7 devices.

“OpenCL for FPGAs provides many benefits – fast time-to-market, quick design exploration, design re-use, and high performance coupled with low power,” stated Ron Huizen, BittWare Vice President of Technology. “When OpenCL is used on a fully-tested, deployable COTS board, the benefits double, giving developers access to the latest generation of high-performance FPGAs on a validated COTS PCI Express board, while also providing them the opportunity to significantly reduce their time-to-market by making use of OpenCL kernels to target Altera FPGAs.”

Benefits of OpenCL for FPGAs:
Faster time-to-market using the OpenCL C-based parallel programming language as opposed to low-level hardware description language (HDL).
Quick design exploration by working at a higher level of design abstraction.
Easy design re-use by re-targeting existing OpenCL C code to current and future FPGAs.
Faster design completion by generating an FPGA implementation of OpenCL C code in a single step, bypassing the manual timing closure efforts and implementation of communication interfaces between the FPGA, host, and external memories.
Increased performance by offloading performance-intensive functions from the host processor to the FPGA
Significantly lower power by using the Altera SDK for OpenCL which generates only the logic needed to deliver the required application
BittWare’s OpenCL Development Support Includes:
BittWare S5-PCI-HQ Altera Stratix V GSMD5 half-length PCIe board with two banks of 4GByte DDR3 SDRAM
BittWare BittWorks II Toolkit application development software for BittWare COTS boards
BittWare Breakout Board (BWBO) providing front panel access to signals and interfaces on the S5PH-Q (two RS-232 connectors, an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, and a micro-USB shell that are all accessible via the front panel)
Altera Quartus II software
Altera SDK for OpenCL available from Altera for their OpenCL EAP customers
Altera USB Byte Blaster to download configuration or program data into the Stratix V

Availability: Now with the Altera Stratix V GSMD5 FPGA and two banks of 4 GByte DDR3 SDRAM for Altera OpenCL EAP customers.