what is the fastest speed that FPGA deals with CPU?

Dear all,

Is PCI the only convinient interfacing unit that talks with CPU by inserting something into a computer conviniently? What is the speed of that? Is there any faster method?

Thanks a lot,

-Walala

Reply to
walala
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PCI is the only relatively fast interface that is available on almost any computer for internal extensions and has good operating system support for hardware drivers. The usual 32-Bit, 33MHz PCI can provide

133MB/s in theory of which about 90MByte/s are usable without to much effort for writes, considerably less for reads. There are also 66MHz and/or 64-Bit variants available on more expensive mainboards.

But there are lots of alternatives. There are faster "PCI-like" interfaces like AGP, PCI-X, PCI-Express (only possible with some FPGAs). You can also connect your hardware via ATA or SCSI busses. That's about the speed of PCI. For data aquisition tasks you can make your hardware look like a tape drive so that you do not need to write a driver and readout software. Just use the tar command for that.

Probably the fastest interface inside a PC is a memory slot. But getting OS support for your device in this case is not straight forward. But there are a couple of GByte/s available there.

And then you can use all the external interfaces: FireWire, USB, Ethernet, ...

Kolja Sulimma

Reply to
Kolja Sulimma

inserting

there

Hi, Kolja,

Thanks a lot for your help!

Can you compare in a little more detail of those internal or external interfaces?

For example, USB vs. PCI? Or PCI-X vs. FireWire?

I guess USB is not as fast as PCI, right?

Thanks a lot,

-Walala

Reply to
walala

Hi,

I am working with PCI-X Interface, which is 64bits wide and 133Mhz.

But I have some problem in getting this much frequency in Xilinx FPGA?

Regards, Muthu

Reply to
Muthu

This is a little bit OT for this group, but anyway: All this depends on your application, the interfaces have various strengths and weeknesses in areas like latency, streaming read/write, single reads/writes and so on. Also, utilisation of the bandwidth tends to become worse for the faster interfaces. But very roughly USB2.0, FireWire four times as fast as 100Mb Ethernet PCI, U160-SCSI, Fibre Channel, Gb-Ethernet are twice as fast as USB2.0/FireWire PCI32-66MHz, PCI64-33MHz, U320-SCSI, 2Gb Fibre Channelare twice as fast as PCI32-33MHz PCI64-66MHz, PCI-X-66MHz, 1xInfiniBand, 1xPCI-Express are twice as fast as PCI32-66MHz. PCI-X-1.0-133MHz is twice as fast as PCI-X-66MHz PCI-X-2.0-266MHz, 10Gb Fibre Channel, 10 Gb Ethernet, 4xInfiniBand,

4xPCI-Express are twice as fast as PCI-X-133MHz PCI-X-2.0-533MHz is twice as fast as PCI-X-266MHz PCI-X-3.0-1066MHz, 40 Gb Ethernet will be twice as fast as PCI-X-533MHz

Somewhere in the upper range there are AMDs HyperTransport and Motorolas RapidIO

Kolja Sulimma

Reply to
Kolja Sulimma

If you are looking for "coprocessing" types of connectivity, AMD Opterons with Hypertransport are one possibility. FPGAs can directly attach to an Opteron via Hypertransport--FPGAs cannot directly connect to an Intel CPU Front Side Bus (FSB). In addition, all the external transactions flow through the Intel FSB whereas the onboard Opteron Memory Controller will service a substantial amount of load--leaving only the IO traffic for the hypertransport links.

Paul

walala wrote:

Reply to
Paul Hartke

Hi, Muthu,

So you mean you cannot get such speed as claimed?

-Walala

Reply to
walala

Dear Koja,

I still have a small question: you said 40GB Ethernet is twice as fast as PCI-X-533MHz... but why 1) we have not seen any Ethernet inside PC? 2)Why don't we use that in our Lan other than our currently using 100M ethernet...

maybe that's very expensive price... am I right?

thanks a lot,

-wAlala

Reply to
walala

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