Introduction
In the previous tutorial, we have built C program for testing the GCD core. In this tutorial, we are going to improve our C program. We are going to make performance comparison between hardware GCD vs. software GCD (implemented in C).
Get the full source code from here. Some of the code was adapted from the book Embedded SoPC Design with Nios II Processor and Verilog Examples, by Pong P. Chu.
Performance Comparison
First, we are going to two functions: calc_gcd_hw (in line 88-103) and calc_gcd_sw (in line 39-86). The function calc_gcd_hw is similar to the implementation in the previous tutorial. It calculates GCD using the GCD core. The difference is that in this function we read the perfromance counter, in line 100. The function calc_gcd_sw implements the software GCD. It is similar to the C code in tutorial part 1.
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// Author: Erwin Ouyang // Date : 5 Feb 2019 #include <stdio.h> #include <stdint.h> #include <stdlib.h> unsigned int calc_gcd_sw(unsigned int a, unsigned int b, unsigned int *clks); unsigned int calc_gcd_hw(unsigned int a, unsigned int b, unsigned int *clks); int main() { unsigned int a, b; unsigned int r_sw, r_hw; unsigned int sw_clks, total_sw_clks; unsigned int hw_clks, total_hw_clks; unsigned int samples = 10000; printf("HW/SW comparison of GCD algorithm:\n"); for (int i = 0; i < samples; i++) { a = rand() + 1; b = rand() + 1; r_sw = calc_gcd_sw(a, b, &sw_clks); r_hw = calc_gcd_hw(a, b, &hw_clks); if (r_sw != r_hw) printf("Inconsistency: gcd(%d,%d)=%d/%d\n", a, b, r_sw, r_hw); total_sw_clks += sw_clks; total_hw_clks += hw_clks; } printf("Average clocks (software/hardware) = %d/%d\n", total_sw_clks/samples, total_hw_clks/samples); printf("Hardware accelerator speed up = %.2f\n", (double)total_sw_clks/total_hw_clks); return 0; } unsigned int calc_gcd_sw(unsigned int a, unsigned int b, unsigned int *clks) { uint32_t *perf_cnt_p; uint8_t n = 0; unsigned int overhead; // Initialize pointer to AXI performance counter perf_cnt_p = (uint32_t *)0x42000000; // *** Determine the overhead of accessing the AXI performance counter *** *(perf_cnt_p+0) = 0x1; // Start *(perf_cnt_p+0) = 0x2; // Stop overhead = *(perf_cnt_p+1); // *** Start actual measurement *** *(perf_cnt_p+0) = 0x1; // Start while (1) { if (a == b) break; if ((a % 2) == 0) // a even { a = a >> 1; if ((b % 2) == 0) // b even { b = b >> 1; n++; } } else // a odd { if ((b % 2) == 0) // b even b = b >> 1; else // b odd { if (a > b) a = a - b; else b = b - a; } } } a = a << n; *(perf_cnt_p+0) = 0x2; // Stop *clks = *(perf_cnt_p+1) - overhead; // Read performance counter return a; } unsigned int calc_gcd_hw(unsigned int a, unsigned int b, unsigned int *clks) { uint32_t *gcd_p; // Initialize pointer to AXI GCD gcd_p = (uint32_t *)0x41000000; // *** Calculate hardware GCD *** *(gcd_p+1) = a; *(gcd_p+2) = b; *(gcd_p+0) = 0x1; // Start while (!(*(gcd_p+0) & (1 << 1))); // Wait until done flag is set *clks = *(gcd_p+4); // Read performance counter return *(gcd_p+3); } |
How the code works:
- First, in main function, we do 10000 GCD calculations both in hardware and software.
- In line 26, we check whether the results from hardware are the same with the results from software or not.
- In line 28-29, we accumulate the clock cycles from the performance counter both for hardware and software GCD.
- We measure the clock cycles of software GCD by using the performance counter. It is done by taking two time stamps, before and after executing the function calc_gcd_sw, as shown in line 54-82.
- In line 49-51, we calculates the overhead associated with the execution of the C code for accessing the performance counter, and we subtract it from the final counter value.
- Finally, in line 31-34, we print the average number of clock cycles and the accelerator speed up to the SDK terminal.
The following figure shows the result from the SDK terminal.
Summary
In this tutorial, we have built the C program for comparing the performance of the hardware GCD and software GCD. We use performance counter to count how many clock cycles does it takes to do the GCD calculation for both hardware and software. Finally, we calculates the average clock cycles and accelerator speed up.