I was reading one of those CPU benchmark articles some months back, and I had the idea that another application area that would be good for this would be Verilog synthesis (and P&R and all that) and simulation. It also occurred to me that if we were to offer some of OUR Verilog code for the benchmark runs, we could be credited with that, and it would be good publicity. I emailed the author of the article with the idea, and he said he was interested. Unfortunately, I have kinda dropped the ball on this with other priorities, so I was hoping I could ask for some assistance.
I'd like to start a discussion on this as to what pieces that we have would be good to benchmark with. We have some larger modules that take some time to synthesize, like PCI and memory, but none of them take very long to run through relatively representative simulations. We should pick modules for these tests that show off what we've done. One idea I have is to bind together the PCI target, the nanocontroller, and the memory controller in some reasonably meaningful way, as though they were on one chip (no need to make this realistic with respect to OGD1). This might be large enough to take some time to for synthesis. Then, we take the same design and put it into a simulation environment where the nanocontroller is programmed through PCI and then made to run a rather long computation from its microcode memory. Really, we're going to have to put together a relatively polished couple of things for the benchmarker to unzip and run. This isn't like a test you'd put together yourself, because someone unfamiliar with chip design will have to be able to run it without breaking it, and if they do manage to break it, they just reinstall it. We can surely have them install the Lattice tools or the Xilinx WebPack, but then there needs to be a zip file to drop in a specific place so that they can just open the project and click the right button. For the simulation, I was wondering what it would take to get a Cygwin environment set up for easy install, and when it's done, there's a shell script to run that times an Icarus run on our controller simulation. Thoughts? Anyone want to help? :) -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
