Acceleration: An Industrial Analogy - 2022.2 English

Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Application Acceleration Development (UG1393)

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2022-12-07
Version
2022.2 English

There are distinct differences between CPUs, GPUs, and programmable devices. Understanding these differences is key to efficiently developing applications for each kind of device and achieving optimal acceleration.

Both CPUs and GPUs have pre-defined architectures, with a fixed number of cores, a fixed-instruction set, and a rigid memory architecture. GPUs scale performance through the number of cores and by employing SIMD/SIMT parallelism. In contrast, programmable devices are fully customizable architectures. The developer creates compute units that are optimized for application needs. Performance is achieved by creating deeply pipelined datapaths, rather than multiplying the number of compute units.

Think of a CPU as a group of workshops, with each one employing a very skilled worker. These workers have access to general purpose tools that let them build almost anything. Each worker crafts one item at a time, successively using different tools to turn raw material into finished goods. This sequential transformation process can require many steps, depending on the nature of the task. The workshops are independent, and the workers can all be doing different tasks without distractions or coordination problems.

A GPU also has workshops and workers, but it has considerably more of them, and the workers are much more specialized. They have access to only specific tools and can do fewer things, but they do them very efficiently. GPU workers function best when they do the same few tasks repeatedly, and when all of them are doing the same thing at the same time. After all, with so many different workers, it is more efficient to give them all the same orders.

Programmable devices take this workshop analogy into the industrial age. If CPUs and GPUs are groups of individual workers taking sequential steps to transform inputs into outputs, programmable devices are factories with assembly lines and conveyer belts. Raw materials are progressively transformed into finished goods by groups of workers dispatched along assembly lines. Each worker performs the same task repeatedly and the partially finished product is transferred from worker to worker on the conveyer belt. This results in a much higher production throughput.

Another major difference with programmable devices is that the factories and assembly lines do not already exist, unlike the workshops and workers in CPUs and GPUs. To refine our analogy, a programmable device would be like a collection of empty lots waiting to be developed. This means that the device developer gets to build factories, assembly lines, and workstations, and then customizes them for the required task instead of using general purpose tools. And just like lot size, device real-estate is not infinite, which limits the number and size of the factories which can be built in the device. Properly architecting and configuring these factories is therefore a critical part of the device programming process.

Traditional software development is about programming functionality on a pre-defined architecture. Programmable device development is about programming an architecture to implement the desired functionality.