Visible to Intel only — GUID: wvc1521143209127
Ixiasoft
Visible to Intel only — GUID: wvc1521143209127
Ixiasoft
8.5. Limitations of the Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Standard Edition Emulator
- Execution model
The Emulator supports the same compilation modes as the FPGA variant. As a result, you must call the clCreateProgramBinary function to create cl_program objects for emulation.
- Concurrent execution
Modeling of concurrent kernel executions has limitations. During execution, the Emulator does not actually run interacting work-items in parallel. Therefore, some concurrent execution behaviors, such as different kernels accessing global memory without a barrier for synchronization, might generate inconsistent emulation results between executions.
- Kernel performance
The .aocx file that you generate for emulation does not include any optimizations. Therefore, it might execute at a significantly slower speed than what an optimized kernel might achieve. In addition, because the Emulator does not implement actual parallel execution, the execution time multiplies with the number of work-items that the kernel executes.
- The Emulator executes the host runtime and the kernels in the same address space. Certain pointer or array usages in your host application might cause the kernel program to fail, and vice versa. Example usages include indexing external allocated memory and writing to random pointers. You may use memory leak detection tools such as Valgrind to analyze your program. However, the host might encounter a fatal error caused by out-of-bounds write operations in your kernel, and vice versa.
- Emulation of channel behavior has limitations, especially for conditional channel operations where the kernel does not call the channel operation in every loop iteration. In these cases, the Emulator might execute channel operations in a different order than on the hardware.