Developer Guide

FPGA Optimization Guide for Intel® oneAPI Toolkits

ID 767853
Date 3/31/2023
Public

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Occupancy

The occupancy of a datapath at a point in time refers to the proportion of the datapath that contains valid data. The occupancy of a circuit over the execution of a program is the average occupancy over time from the moment the program starts to run until it has been completed.

Unoccupied portions of the datapath are often referred to as bubbles. Bubbles are analogous to no-operation (no-ops) instructions for a CPU that have no effect on the final output.

Decreasing bubbles increase occupancy. In the absence of other bottlenecks, maximizing occupancy of the datapath results in higher throughput.

A Datapath Through Four Iterations Showing A Bubble Traveling Through