Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Pro Edition: Best Practices Guide

ID 683521
Date 3/28/2022
Public

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4.9. Avoiding Work-Item ID-Dependent Backward Branching

The Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Offline Compiler collapses conditional statements into single bits that indicate when a particular functional unit becomes active. The offline compiler completely eliminates simple control flows that do not involve looping structures, resulting in a flat control structure and more efficient hardware usage. The offline compiler compiles kernels that include forward branches, such as conditional statements, efficiently.

Avoid including any work-item ID-dependent backward branching (that is, branching that occurs in a loop) in your kernel because it degrades performance.

For example, the following code fragment illustrates branching that involves work-item ID such as get_global_id or get_local_id:

for (size_t i = 0; i < get_global_id(0); i++)
{
	  // statements
}