AI Engine Pipeline View - 2023.2 English

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

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2023-12-13
Version
2023.2 English

The AI Engine Pipeline view in the Vitis unified IDE allows you to correlate instructions executed in a specific clock cycle with the labels in the Disassembly view. The underlying AI Engine pipeline is exposed in debug mode using the pipeline view. The Vitis unified IDE supports viewing pipeline view for all the kernels in your graph.

To enable the Pipeline view select Enable Pipeline View from the Debug launch configuration after the project has been built successfully. The Pipeline view is available with the AI Engine simulator only.

Figure 1. Enable Profiling
Tip: When Enable Profile is selected the Pipeline view is enabled as well.

Click on Debug to start debugging the application. Note the Pipeline view shows up automatically in the Debugger Console window.

Figure 2. Pipeline View

Runtime statistics of the kernel in the pipeline view are highlighted in the previous figure.

  1. AI Engine kernel cycle count
  2. Program counter
  3. ID = Instruction decode
  4. E1-E7 are the AI Engine execution stages. Almost all operations in the scalar unit are scheduled in E1 stage of the pipeline besides non-linear operations. The vector unit scheduling spans from the ID stage to the E6 stage. Address Generation Units (AGUs) span over two pipeline stages. The address is ready in the E2 stage of the pipeline. For load units, the data will be available in the AI Engine from the memory module in the E7 stage. For the store unit, the data will be sent out from the AI Engine to the memory module in the E5 or E6 stage of the pipeline, depending on the type of instruction.
  5. Step Over in the debug view is shown in the following figure. As shown the previous instruction, this is run in E1 stage. The result is updated in Register Inspector.
Figure 3. Stepping Over with Pipeline View