OpenGPU on Altera Cyclone V FPGA at Linaro Connect 2017

Posted by – September 27, 2017

Fabrício Ribeiro Toloczko, ​Systems engineer of The Technological Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI-tec) and CITI-USP (Interdisciplinary Center in Interactive Technologies from University of São Paulo) presents the OpenGPU, a real GPU implementation that proposes a methodology to progressively develop hardware from a software implementation, making the process for producing hardware more easy and fast. Today, it runs on an Altera Cyclone V SoC FPGA with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9. This processor is used to keep running a Linux distribution, while sending and receiving data through the memory mapped communication with the FPGA. Mesa3D and Gallium’s softpipe driver are used for creating most of the graphic pipeline. The FPGA holds one rasterizer, which is a fixed function in graphic pipeline. With that, it’s possible to run any OpenGL application, doing the hardware and software changes in real time.