BittWare Announces Special Pricing for Altera Stratix® V FPGA PCIe Board for OpenCL Development

BittWare announced today that their S5-PCIe-HQ PCIe COTS board, populated with the Altera Stratix V GSMD5 FPGA, has been specially priced for use with Altera''s Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL.

The Altera® SDK for OpenCL provides a design environment enabling users to easily implement OpenCL applications on Altera’s FPGAs. This SDK currently supports BittWare’s S5-PCIe-HQ (S5PH-Q) Altera Stratix® V half-length PCIe COTS board populated with the Stratix V GSMD5.

Future support for BittWare’s S5PH-Q will include both the Altera Stratix V GSMD8 and GXMA7 devices. The S5PH-Q is a half-length PCIe card based on Altera’s high-performance 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs, providing a versatile and efficient solution for high-performance network processing, signal processing, and data acquisition. BittWare''s OpenCL

Development Support Includes:

• BittWare S5-PCI-HQ Altera Stratix V GSMD5 half-length PCIe board with two banks of 4GByte DDR3 SDRAM
• BittWare BittWorks II Toolkit application development software for BittWare COTS boards
• BittWare Breakout Board (BWBO) providing front panel access to signals and interfaces on the S5PH-Q (two RS-232 connectors, an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, and a micro-USB shell that are all accessible via the front panel)
• Altera Quartus® II software
• Altera SDK for OpenCL available from Altera for their OpenCL EAP customers
• Altera USB Byte Blaster to download configuration or program data into the Stratix V "OpenCL for FPGAs provides many benefits - fast time-to-market, quick design exploration, design re-use, and high performance coupled with low power," stated Ron Huizen, BittWare Vice President of Technology. "When OpenCL is used on a fully-tested, deployable COTS board, the benefits double, giving developers access to the latest generation of high-performance FPGAs on a validated COTS PCI Express board, while also providing them the opportunity to significantly reduce their time-to-market by making use of OpenCL kernels to target Altera FPGAs." There are many benefits to using OpenCL for FPGAs -
• Faster time-to-market using the OpenCL C-based parallel programming language as opposed to low-level hardware description language (HDL) • Quick design exploration by working at a higher level of design abstraction
• Easy design re-use by re-targeting existing OpenCL C code to current and future FPGAs
• Faster design completion by generating an FPGA implementation of OpenCL C code in a single step, bypassing the manual timing closure efforts and implementation of communication interfaces between the FPGA, host, and external memories.
• Increased performance by offloading performance-intensive functions from the host processor to the FPGA
• Significantly lower power by using the Altera SDK for OpenCL which generates only the logic needed to deliver the required application. BittWare’s S5PH-Q board for OpenCL development is available today with the Altera Stratix V GSMD5 FPGA and two banks of 4GB DDR3 SDRAM for Altera OpenCL EAP customers.

For more information about OpenCL for Altera FPGAs, or the special offer pricing for BittWare''s S5PH-Q board for OpenCL development support please contact Sarsen Technology, BittWare’s UK representative − info@sarsen.net .