Data Access Patterns

An FPGA is selected to implement the C code due to the superior performance of the FPGA - the massively parallel architecture of an FPGA allows it to perform operations much faster than the inherently sequential operations of a processor, and users typically wish to take advantage of that performance.

The focus here is on understanding the impact that the access patterns inherent in the C code might have on the results. Although the access patterns of most concern are those into and out of the hardware function, it is worth considering the access patterns within functions as any bottlenecks within the hardware function will negatively impact the transfer rate into and out of the function.

To highlight how some data access patterns can negatively impact performance and demonstrate how other patterns can be used to fully embrace the parallelism and high performance capabilities of an FPGA, this section reviews an image convolution algorithm.