Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Pro Edition: Programming Guide

ID 683846
Date 3/28/2022
Public

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8. Emulating and Debugging Your OpenCL Kernel

The Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Emulator assesses the functionality of your kernel.

The Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Emulator generates a .aocx file that executes on x86-64 Windows or Linux host. This feature allows you to emulate the functionality of your kernel and iterate on your design without executing it on the actual FPGA each time. For Linux platform, you can also use the Emulator to perform functional debug.

Important: Emulation does not support cross-compilation to ARM® processor. To run emulation on a design that targets an ARM SoC device, emulate on a non-SoC board (for example, <board_package_path>/s10_ref or <board_package_path>/a10_ref). When you are satisfied with the emulation results, you may target your design on an SoC board for subsequent optimization steps.
The emulator supports 64-bit Windows and Linux operating systems. On Linux systems, the GNU C Library (glibc) version 2.15 or later is required. .
Note: You cannot use the execution time of an emulated design to estimate its execution time on an FPGA. Furthermore, running an emulated design is not a substitute for natively running a functionally equivalent C/C++ implementation on an x86-64 host.