BittWare Announces Special Pricing for Altera Stratix V FPGA PCI Express Board for OpenCL Development

BittWare, the leader in Altera-based FPGA COTS boards, announced today that their S5-PCIe-HQ (S5PH-Q) PCIe COTS board populated with the Altera Stratix V GSMD5 device has been specially priced for use with Altera's Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL. The S5PH-Q is a half-length PCIe card based on Altera's high-performance 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs, providing a versatile and efficient solution for high-performance network processing, signal processing, and data acquisition. The S5PH-Q GSMD5 is available now for Altera OpenCL Early Access Program (EAP) customers, along with BittWare's BittWorks II Toolkit and Altera's SDK for OpenCL, creating an ideal platform for Stratix V-based OpenCL development. Future Altera SDK support for BittWare's S5PH-Q will include both the Altera Stratix V GSMD8 and GXMA7 devices.

"OpenCL for FPGAs provides many benefits - fast time-to-market, quick design exploration, design re-use, and high performance coupled with low power," stated Ron Huizen, BittWare Vice President of Technology. "When OpenCL is used on a fully-tested, deployable COTS board, the benefits double, giving developers access to the latest generation of high-performance FPGAs on a validated COTS PCI Express board, while also providing them the opportunity to significantly reduce their time-to-market by making use of OpenCL kernels to target Altera FPGAs."

Learn more about OpenCL for Altera FPGAs and BittWare's S5PH-Q board for OpenCL development support with special pricing for Altera's OpenCL EAP customers.

Benefits of OpenCL for FPGAs:

• Faster time-to-market using the OpenCL C-based parallel programming language as opposed to low-level hardware description language (HDL).
• Quick design exploration by working at a higher level of design abstraction.
• Easy design re-use by re-targeting existing OpenCL C code to current and future FPGAs.
• Faster design completion by generating an FPGA implementation of OpenCL C code in a single step, bypassing the manual timing closure efforts and implementation of communication interfaces between the FPGA, host, and external memories.
• Increased performance by offloading performance-intensive functions from the host processor to the FPGA
• Significantly lower power by using the Altera SDK for OpenCL which generates only the logic needed to deliver the required application

BittWare's OpenCL Development Support Includes:

• BittWare S5-PCI-HQ Altera Stratix V GSMD5 half-length PCIe board with two banks of 4GByte DDR3 SDRAM
• BittWare BittWorks II Toolkit application development software for BittWare COTS boards
• BittWare Breakout Board (BWBO) providing front panel access to signals and interfaces on the S5PH-Q (two RS-232 connectors, an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, and a micro-USB shell that are all accessible via the front panel)
• Altera Quartus II software
• Altera SDK for OpenCL available from Altera for their OpenCL EAP customers
• Altera USB Byte Blaster to download configuration or program data into the Stratix V

Availability
BittWare's S5PH-Q board for OpenCL development is available today with the Altera Stratix V GSMD5 FPGA and two banks of 4 GByte DDR3 SDRAM for Altera OpenCL EAP customers.