I am new to FPGA programming and I have a question regarding the performance in terms of overall execution time.
I have read that latency is calculated in terms of cycle-time. Hence, overall execution time = latency * cycle time.
I want to optimize the time needed in processing the data, I would be measuring the overall execution time.
Let's say I have a calculation a = b * c * d.
If I make it to calculate in two cycles (result1 = b * c) & (a = result1 * d), the overall execution time would be latency of 2 * cycle time(which is determined by the delay of the multiplication operation say value X) = 2X
If I make the calculation in one cycle ( a = b * c * d). the overall execution time would be latency of 1 * cycle time (say value 2X since it has twice of the delay because of two multiplication instead of one) = 2X
So, it seems that for optimizing the performance in terms of execution time, if I focus only on decreasing the latency, the cycle time would increase and vice versa. Is there a case where both latency and the cycle time could be decreased, causing the execution time to decrease? When should I focus on optimizing the latency and when should I focus on cycle-time?
Also, when I am programming in C++, it seems that when I want to optimize the code, I would like to optimize the latency( the cycles needed for the execution). However, it seems that for FPGA programming, optimizing the latency is not adequate as the cycle time would increase. Hence, I should focus on optimizing the execution time ( latency * cycle time). Am I correct in this if I could like to increase the speed of the program?
Hope that someone would help me with this. Thanks in advance.
I tend to think of latency as the time from the first input to the first output. As there is usually a series of data, it is useful to look at the time taken to process multiple inputs, one after another.
With your example, to process 10 items doing a = b x c x d in one cycle (one cycle = 2t) would take 20t. However doing it in two 1t cycles, to process 10 items would take 11t.
Hope that helps.
Edit Add timing.
Calculation in one 2t cycle. 10 calculations.
Time 0 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 = 20t
Input 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Output 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Calculation in two 1t cycles, pipelined, 10 calculations
Time 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 = 11t
Input 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Stage1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Output 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Latency for both solutions is 2t, one 2t cycle for the first one, and two 1t cycles for the second one. However the through put of the second solution is twice as fast. Once the latency is accounted for, you get a new answer every 1t cycle.
So if you had a complex calculation that required say 5 1t cycles, then the latency would be 5t, but the through put would still be 1t.
You need another word in addition to latency and cycle-time, which is throughput. Even if it takes 2 cycles to get an answer, if you can put new data in every cycle and get it out every cycle, your throughput can be increased by 2x over the "do it all in one cycle".
Say your calculation takes 40 ns in one cycle, so a throughput of 25 million data items/sec.
If you pipeline it (which is the technical term for splitting up the calculation into multiple cycles) you can do it in 2 lots of 20ns + a bit (you lose a bit in the extra registers that have to go in). Let's say that bit is 10 ns (which is a lot, butmakes the sums easy). So now it takes 2x25+10=50 ns => 20M items/sec. Worse!
But, if you can make the 2 stages independent of each other (in your case, not sharing the multiplier) you can push new data into the pipeline every 25+a bit ns. This "a bit" will be smaller than the previous one, but even if it's the whole 10 ns, you can push data in at 35ns times or nearly 30M items/sec, which is better than your started with.
In real life the 10ns will bemuch less, often 100s of ps, so the gains are much larger.
George described accurately the meaning latency (which does not necessary relate to computation time). Its seems you want to optimize your design for speed. This is very complex and requires much experience. The total runtime is
execution_time = (latency + (N * computation_cycles) ) * cycle_time
Where N is the number of calculations you want to perform. If you develop for acceleration you should only compute on large data sets, i.e. N is big. Usually you then dont have requirements for latency (which could be in real time applications different). The determining factors are then the cycle_time and the computation_cycles. And here it is really hard to optimize, because there is a relation. The cycle_time is determined by the critical path of your design, and that gets longer the fewer registers you have on it. The longer it gets, the bigger is the cycle_time. But the more registers you have the higher is your computation_cycles (each register increases the number of required cycles by one).
Maybe I should add, that the latency is usually the number of computation_cycles (its the first computation that makes the latency) but in theory this can be different.
Related
So I am going through some tutorials, and it seems they keep using "instructions" and "cycles" interchangeably, so now I am confused what is actually measured in Hertz (on the most basic level, without going into what the modern processors can do in parallel etc, trying to learn the basics here).
Say, the program is as follows: load two numbers, add them, store result.
So there will be 4 cycles:
load number A [fetch-decode-execute]
load number B [fetch-decode-execute]
add A and B [fetch-decode-execute]
store result [fetch-decode-execute]
What is a cycle here, and what is an instruction?
There are 4 cycles, or 12 instructions, correct?
Say, it takes CPU 1 sec to run this program.
What will be the CPU clock speed? 12 instructions/1 sec or 4 cycles/1 sec?
If the former one, then is the clock speed of the CPU 12 Hertz?
If the latter one, then is the clock speed of the CPU 4 Hertz?
From helpful comments by #Nate Eldredge:
"A fetch-decode-execute cycle is one instruction cycle, but three clock cycles.
The clock speed measures the number of clock cycles per second."
Thus, if the program is executed within 1 second, and it takes 12 clock cycles, the clock speed of that particular CPU is 12 Hz.
From what I understand, to calculate CPI, it's the percentage of the type of instruction multiplied by the number of cycles right? Does the type of machine have any part of this calculation whatsoever?
I have a problem that asks me if a change should be recommended.
Machine 1: 40% R - 5 Cycles, 30% lw - 6 Cycles, 15% sw - 6 Cycles, 15% beq 3 - Cycles, on a 2.5 GHz machine
Machine 2: 40% R - 5 Cycles, 30% lw - 6 Cycles, 15% sw - 6 Cycles, 15% beq 4 - Cycles, on a 2.7 GHz machine
By my calculations, machine 1 has 5.15 CPI while machine 2 has 5.3 CPI. Is it okay to ignore the GHz of the machine and say that the change would not be a good idea or do I have to factor the machine in?
I think the point is to evaluate a design change that makes an instruction take more clocks, but allows you to raise the clock frequency. (i.e. leaning towards a speed-demon design like Pentium 4, instead of brainiac like Apple's A7/A8 ARM cores. http://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/)
So you need to calculate instructions per second to see which one will get more work done in the same amount of real time. i.e. (clock/sec) / (clocks/insn) = insn/sec, cancelling out the clocks from the units.
Your CPI calculation looks ok; I didn't check it, but yes a weighted average of the cycles according to the instruction mix.
These numbers are obviously super simplified; any CPU worth building at 2.5GHz would have some kind of branch prediction so the cost of a branch isn't just a 3 or 4 instruction bubble. And taking ~5 cycles per instruction on average is pathetic. (Most pipelined designs aim for at least 1 instruction per clock.)
Caches and superscalar CPUs also lead to complex interactions between instructions depending on whether they depend on earlier results or not.
But this is sort of like what you might do if considering increasing the L1d cache load-use latency by 1 cycle (for example), if that took it off the critical path and let you raise the clock frequency. Or vice versa, tightening up the latency or reducing the number of pipeline stages on something at the cost of reducing frequency.
Cycles per instruction a count of cycles. ghz doesnt matter as far as that average goes. But saying that we can see from your numbers that one instruction is more clocks but the processors are a different speed.
So while it takes more cycles to do the same job on the faster processor the speed of the processor DOES compensate for that so it seems clear this is a question about does the processor speed account for the extra clock?
5.15 cycles/instruction / 2.5 (giga) cycles/second, cycles cancels out you get
2.06 seconds/(giga) instruction or (nano) seconds/ instruction
5.30 / 2.7 = 1.96296 (nano) seconds / instruction
The faster one takes a slightly less amount of time so it will run the program faster.
Another way to see this to check the math.
For 100 clock cycles on the slower machine 15% of those are beq. So 15 of the 100 clocks, which is 5 beq instructions. The same 5 beq instructions take 20 clocks on the faster machine so 105 clocks total for the same instructions on the faster machine.
100 cycles at 2.5ghz vs 105 at 2.7ghz
we want the amount of time
hz is cycles / second we want seconds on the top
so we want
cycles / (cycles/second) to have cycles cancel out and have seconds on the top
1/2.5 = 0.400 (400 picoseconds)
1/2.7 = 0.370
0.400 * 100 = 40.00 units of time
0.370 * 105 = 38.85 units of time
So despite taking 5 more cycles the processor speed differences is fast enough to compensate.
2.7/2.5 = 1.08
105/100 = 1.05
so 2.5 * 1.05 = 2.625 so a processor 2.625ghz or faster would run that program faster.
Now what were the rules for changing computers, is less time defined as a reason to change computers? What is the definition of better? How much more power does the faster one consume it might take less time but the power consumption might not be linear so it may take more watts despite taking less time. I assume the question is not that detailed, meaning it is vague meaning it is a poorly written question on its own, so it goes to what the textbook or lecture defined as the threshold for change to the other processor.
Disclaimer, dont blame me if you miss this question on your homework/test.
Outside an academic exercise like this, the real world is full of pipelined processors (not all but most of the folks writing programs are writing programs for) and basically you cant put a number on clock cycles per instruction type in a way that you can do this calculation because of a laundry list of factors. Make sore you understand that, nice exercise, but that specific exercise is difficult and dangerous to attempt on real world processors. Dangerous in that as hard as you work you may be incorrectly measuring something and jumping to the wrong conclusions and as a result making bad recommendations. At the same time there is very much the reality that faster ghz does improve some percentage of the execution, but another percentage suffers, and is there a net gain or loss. Or a new processor design faster or slower may have features that perform better than an older processor, but not all feature will be better, there is a tradeoff and then we get into what "better" means.
I have been stuck on this for the past day. Im not sure how to calculate cpu utilization percentage for processes using round robin algorithm.
Let say we have these datas with time quantum of 1. Job Letter followed by arrival and burst time. How would i go about calculating the cpu utilization? I believe the formula is
total burst time / (total burst time + idle time). I know idle time means when the cpu are not busy but not sure how to really calculate it the processes. If anyone can walk me through it, it is greatly appreciated
A 2 6
B 3 1
C 5 9
D 6 7
E 7 10
Well,The formula is correct but in order to know the total-time you need to know the idle-time of CPU and you know when your CPU becomes idle? During the context-swtich it becomes idlt and it depends on short-term-scheduler how much time it take to assign the next proccess to CPU.
In 10-100 milliseconds of time quantua , context swtich time is arround 10 microseconds which is very small factor , now you can guess the context-switch time with time quantum of 1 millisecond. It will be ignoreable but it also results in too many context-switches.
Hi I have a question regarding inherent parallelism.
Let's say we have a sequential program which takes 20 seconds to complete execution. Suppose the execution time consists of 2 seconds of setup time at the beginning and 2 seconds of finalization time at the end of the execution, and the remaining work can be parallelized. How do we calculate the inherent parallelism of this program?
How do you define "inherent parallelism"? I've not heard the term. We can talk about "possible speedup".
OP said "remaining work can be parallelized"... to what degree?
Can it run with infinite parallelism? If this were possible (it isn't practical), then the total runtime would be 4 seconds with a speedup of 20/4 --> 5.
If the remaining work can be run on N processors perfectly in parallel,
then the total runtime would be 4+16/N. The ratio of that to 20 seconds is 20/(4+16/N) which can have pretty much any degree of speedup from 1 (no speedup) to 5 (he the limit case) depending on the value of N.
A program run on a parallel machine is measured to have the following efficiency values for increasing numbers of processors, P.
P 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
E 100 90 85 80 70 60 50
Using the above results, plot the speedup graph.
Use the graph to explain whether or not the program has been successfully parallelized.
P E Speedup
1 100% 1
2 90% 1.8
3 85% 2.55
4 80% 3.2
5 70% 3.5
6 60% 3.6
7 50% 3.5
This is a past year exam question, and I know how to calculate the speedup & plot the graph. However I don't know how to tell a program is successfully parallelized.
Amdahl's law
I think the idea here is that not all portion can be parallelized.
For example, if a program needs 20 hours using a single processor core, and a particular portion of 1 hour cannot be parallelized, while the remaining promising portion of 19 hours (95%) can be parallelized, then regardless of how many processors we devote to a parallelized execution of this program, the minimum execution time cannot be less than that critical 1 hour. Hence the speedup is limited up to 20×
In this example, the speedup reached maximum 3.6 with 6 processors. So the parallel portion is about 1-1/3.6 is about 72.2%.