Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Standard Edition: Best Practices Guide

ID 683176
Date 9/24/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

3. OpenCL Kernel Design Best Practices

With the technology, you do not need to change your kernel to fit it optimally into a fixed hardware architecture. Instead, the offline compiler customizes the hardware architecture automatically to accommodate your kernel requirements.

In general, you should optimize a kernel that targets a single compute unit first. After you optimize this compute unit, increase the performance by scaling the hardware to fill the remainder of the FPGA. The hardware footprint of the kernel correlates with the time it takes for hardware compilation. Therefore, the more optimizations you can perform with a smaller footprint (that is, a single compute unit), the more hardware compilations you can perform in a given amount of time.

In addition to data processing and memory access optimizations, consider implementing the following design practices, if applicable, when you create your kernels.