Hi, I would like to perform mathematical operations as Division and Square root. From what i have read, i either need to use Microblaze or PowerPC. can anyone please tell me the difference in performance between them, and is it a hardware or software calculation. Does each one of these options has a dedicated FPU?
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Not at all true. Either of those algorithms can be implemented, either in fixed or floating point, as pure hardware.
And either pipelined or combinatorial.
-- glen
Where did you read that? You can perform those mathematical operations using the FPGA fabric perfectly well.
To directly answer the question, Microblaze has an optional FPU (made of LUTs and flipflops). IIRC PowerPC could have an FPU added (also made of LUTs and FFs) so I'd expect performance on those operations to be similar(ish).
Microblaze with an FPU in a Spartan3ADSP will clock happily at tens of MHz. Maths performance is limited - the square-root takes ~30 cycles to complete, so you may get 2-3 Msqrts/sec.
Conversely I've written a pretty wide fixed-point square-root which runs at about the same clock rate, but produces an answer every clock cycle (heavily pipelined).
Cheers, Martin
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