Comparison of Altera NIOS II Processor with Analog Device’s TigerSHARC

1. Comparison of Altera NIOS II Processor with Analog Device’s TigerSHARC

2. Outline • What is a “Soft” Processor • What is the NIOS II? • Architecture for NIOS II, what are the implications • TigerSHARC VS. NIOS II • Pipeline Issues • Issues related to FIR • Hardware acceleration, using FPGA logic

3. What’s is a “Soft” Processor? • Processor implemented in VHDL, Verilog, etc., and downloaded onto FPGA hardware • Can implement many parallel processors on one FPGA • Can use addition FPGA resources on the same chip that is not part of the processor core. • NIOS II is a “Soft” Processor

4. Why “Soft” Processor? • Higher level of design reuse • Reduced obsolescence risk • Simplified design update or change • Increased design implementation options • Lower latency between processor and FPGA components

5. What is NIOS II? • Software-defined processor • The processor core is loaded onto FPGA • Programmed using ‘normal’ programming tools (C, asm), not hardware description languages • Can use the rest of the FPGA hardware for accelerating parts of the code

6. How Is NIOS II Implemented • The custom FPGA logic that interacts with the processor is implemented in Altera Quartus II • The Avalon Interface bus (common instruction/data bus) is implemented in Quartus II • The architecture is generated in Quartus II and used for programming in Eclipse IDE

8. NIOS II IDE • Coding is implemented in Eclipse rather than VisualDSP.

9. The Different NIOS II Cores • There are 3 cores available from Altera • NIOSII/e: Economical Core • NIOSII/s: Standard Core • NIOSII/f: Fast Core

10. What’s the Difference between the Cores? An LE is equivalent to a 8-1 NAND gate + 1 D-Flip Flop An ALM is equivalent to 2 LE’s

11. Comparison of TigerSHARC and NIOS II architecture

12. TigerSHARC Architecture

13. NIOS II Architecture -thirty two 32-bit general registers, six 32-bit control registers -variable cache based on how much FPGA space you have -ALU- 32bit two input to one input, does shifts, logic and arithmetic. Shifter is not separate like TigerSHARC

14. Avalon Interface -separate address, data and control lines -up to 1024-bit data width transfer, can be set to any width (not power of 2) -one transfer per clock cycle.

15. NIOS II/f pipeline • Six stages • One instruction can be dispatched and/or retired pre cycle • Dynamic branch prediction: 2-bit branch history table (no BTB like in TigerSHARC)

16. NIOS II/f pipeline The pipeline stalls for: • Multi-cycle instructions • Cache misses • Data dependencies (2 cycles between calculating and using result) Mispredicted branch penalty: 3 cycles

18. Hardware multiply • Can use different options for multiplier (at the processor design stage) • No h/w multiply (saves FPGA gates) • Speed depends on algorithm • Use embedded multipliers (if FPGA has those) • 1-5 cycles (depends on FPGA) • Implement multipliers on FPGA gates • 11 cycles • Division 4-66 cycles on hardware

19. Compare to TigerSHARC • No support for parallel instructions • No support for SIMD operations • Multicycle instructions stall the pipeline All the above limitations can be overcome by using FPGA space unoccupied by the processor itself

20. Comparison of NIOS II and TigerSHARC on an FIR Algorithm

21. Integer FIR algorithm intcoeff[]={1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}; int data1[] = {1, 0, 0, 0, 0 ,0 ,0,0}; int output[8]; inti=0, j=0, k=0; for(k=0; k<8; k++) output[k] =0; for( j =0; j< 8; j++) { for( i= 0; i< 8; i++) { output[j] += data1[i]*coeff[7-i]; } }

22. Speed analysis

23. Speed analysis • 9 cycles per iteration except the first two (branch predicted not taken) and the last (branch predicted taken) – those will be 9+3=12 cycles • 1 data stall – can remove by moving instruction from line 4 to 7 • Speed: 8 cycles * (N-3) + 11 cycles * 3 = 8*(N-3)+33 cycles • For 1024-tap FIR: 8201 cycles • Clock cycle is 3 times longer (200MHz vs 600MHz)

24. Speed comparison • 8201 NIOS II cycles equivalent to 24603 TigerSHARC cycles • Lab3 timing: • 56000 cycles Debug mode • 13000 unoptimized ASM • 4000 Optimized ASM Worse than unoptimized assembly, but no hardware acceleration used, so this is not that bad

25. Hardware Acceleration • Profiling tool in Eclipse can show how long each function takes • If function takes too long, it can be sped up by • Custom instructions • Hardware Acceleration • Hardware Acceleration is to take the function and transform it into FPGA circuitry

26. Hardware Acceleration • Can be done using C2H compiler from Altera • Trades off Logic Size for Speed up.

27. Conclusion • “Soft” Processors such as the NIOSII offers another alternative in the embedded system scene. • The NIOSII offers the advantage of added configurability, and customization that blur the line between FPGAs and DSPs

28. References [1] http://www.fpgajournal.com/articles/behere.htm Describes an FPGA-DSP project based on Altera Nios [2] http://www.altera.com/products/ip/processors/nios2/ni2-index.html Official Nios II page [3] http://www.hunteng.co.uk/dsp-fpga.htm DSP or FPGA? What is better when? [4] http://www.hunteng.co.uk/pdfs/tech/DSP1736FPGA.pdf Article from Xilinx about FPGA DSPs [5] http://www.niosforum.com Community forum for NIOS [6] http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/nios2/n2cpu_nii5v1.pdf NIOSII Processor Handbook –Altera Corporation [7] http://www.altera.com/literature/manual/mnl_avalon_spec.pdf Avalon Memory-Mapped Interface Specifications – Altera Corporation [8] http://www.analog.com/en/prod/0,2877,ADSP%252DTS201S,00.html ADSP-TS201S 500/600 MHz TigerSHARC Processor with 24 Mbit on-chip embedded DRAM