Altera Announces Industry's First FPGA Support For OpenCL - Eases The Adoption Of FPGAs For Accelerating Heterogeneous Systems

Using FPGAs to Extract Maximum Parallelism in Heterogeneous PlatformsThe Altera SDK for OpenCL enables programmers to leverage the massively parallel, fine-grained architectures featured in FPGAs to accelerate parallel computation. Unlike CPUs and GPGPUs, where parallel threads are executed across an array of cores, FPGAs allow kernel functions to be transformed into dedicated, deeply pipelined hardware circuits that are multithreaded using the concept of pipeline parallelism. Each of these pipelines can be replicated many times to provide even more parallelism by allowing multiple threads to execute in parallel. The result is an FPGA-based solution that can deliver >5X performance/Watt compared to alternative hardware implementations.

Altera is working with several board partners to deliver COTS board solutions to customers. Currently, boards from BittWare and Nallatech are designed to support Altera OpenCL. Additional third-party boards will be supported with future releases of the SDK.

Altera has performed a variety of benchmarks that show the productivity savings and the performance and power efficiency gained by using an OpenCL framework for FPGA development. Based on early benchmarks and working with customers in a variety of markets, the SDK shaved months off one customer's development time for their video processing application and boosted performance by 9X versus a CPU in another customer's financial application.

AvailabilityThe Altera SDK for OpenCL is production ready and is available to customers through an early access program. To discover the high performance, power-efficient acceleration that OpenCL provides with FPGAs, contact a local Altera sales representative. For additional information regarding OpenCL and the benefits of targeting FPGA through an OpenCL implementation, visit http://www.altera.com/products/software/opencl/opencl-index.html.

About AlteraAltera® programmable solutions enable system and semiconductor companies to rapidly and cost-effectively innovate, differentiate, and win in their markets. Find out more about Altera's FPGA, CPLD and ASIC devices at www.altera.com. Follow Altera via Facebook, RSS and Twitter.

ALTERA, ARRIA, CYCLONE, HARDCOPY, MAX, MEGACORE, NIOS, QUARTUS and STRATIX words and logos are trademarks of Altera Corporation and registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple, Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective holders as described at www.altera.com/legal.

Editor Contact: Steve GabrielAltera Corporation(408) 544-6846 [e-mail]

SOURCE Altera Corporation

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