The detailed hardware architecture of the DPU is shown in the following figure. After start-up, the DPU fetches instructions from the off-chip memory to control the operation of the computing engine. The instructions are generated by the Vitis™ AI compiler, where substantial optimizations are performed.
On-chip memory is used to buffer input, intermediate, and output data to achieve high throughput and efficiency. The data is reused as much as possible to reduce the external memory bandwidth. A deep pipelined design is used for the computing engine. The processing elements (PE) take full advantage of the fine-grained building blocks such as multipliers, adders, and accumulators in Xilinx devices.
