Guppy : a GPU-like soft-core processor

• Main Authors: Hagiescu, Andrei, Wong, Weng-Fai, Deragisch, Florian, Al-Dujaili, Abdullah
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/98391; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/16260
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The popularity of GPU programming languages that explicitly express thread-level parallelism leads to the question of whether they can also be used for programming reconfigurable accelerators. This paper describes Guppy, a GPU-like softcore processor based on the in-order LEON3 core. Our long-term vision is to have a unified programming paradigm for accelerators - regardless of whether they are FPGA or GPU based. While others have explored this from a high level hardware synthesis perspective, we chose to adopt the approach of a parametrically reconfigurable softcore. We will discuss the main architecture features of Guppy, compare its performance to the original core. Our design has been synthesized on a Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA.