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

ID 683521
Date 3/28/2022
Public

A newer version of this document is available. Customers should click here to go to the newest version.

Document Table of Contents

5.8.1. High Stall Percentage

A high stall percentage implies that the memory or channel instruction is unable to fulfill the access request because of contention for memory bandwidth or channel buffer space.

Memory instructions stall often whenever bandwidth usage is inefficient or if a large amount of data transfer is necessary during the execution of your application. Inefficient memory accesses lead to suboptimal bandwidth utilization. In such cases, analyze your kernel memory accesses for possible improvements.

Channel instructions stall whenever there is a strong imbalance between read and write accesses to the channel. Imbalances might be caused by channel reads or writes operating at different rates.

For example, if you find that the stall percentage of a write channel call is high, check to see if the occupancy and activity of the read channel call are low. If they are, the performing speed of the kernel controlling the read channel call is too slow for the kernel controlling the write channel call, leading to a performance bottleneck.