AI Engine Frequency Scaling - 2024.1 English

AI Engine System Software Driver Reference Manual (UG1642)

Document ID
UG1642
Release Date
2024-05-30
Version
2024.1 English

The AI Engine device has NPI registers to allow scaling the AI Engine operation frequency at runtime. The AI Engine driver provides APIs for you to specify the frequency the application wants to change to. Internally, it converts the frequency to the scale of the full frequency applied to the AI Engine device. Then it uses eemi ioctl to send and set the quality of service (QoS) request to PLM. PLM aggregates all the requests from different AI Engine users. If the max of the QoS is changed, it changes the AI Engine core reference control NPI register to change the frequency.

On Linux, it is possible to have multiple partitions on the same Linux system. The Linux kernel AI Engine partition driver provides ioctl APIs to the application to set the required frequency of the partition it owned. The AI Engine device driver aggregates the required frequency of all the partitions managed in Linux. If the highest of the required frequency has changed, it converts it to QoS and uses eemi ioctl to send the QoS change request to PLM.

The AI Engine driver API's that allow frequency scaling is exposed to the developer through the command line utility through which you can control the AI Engine frequency. The Xilinx board utility (xbutil) is a standalone command line utility that is included with the Xilinx Runtime (XRT) installation package. The xbutil utility uses the AI Engine SSW driver to enable AI Engine clock frequency scaling at runtime using the sub-command advanced to set/get the AI Engine clock frequency. As shown in following figure, the --get option can read the frequency of the given AI Engine partition (in this case whole array is one single partition) and with the --set option. You can set the frequency value (Hz) to set the given AI Engine partition to (for example 100L, 312.5M, 5G).

Figure 1. xbutil Advanced Features (--aie-clock)