Trading Catechism

nitro said:
This little SoC has so far given me nothing but pleasure. The SoC is running a web sever. When you browse to the SoC, you can do all sorts of things instantly that manipulates the board through the FPGA. Simple things like manipulating LEDs, but this gains you confidence.

Part of the system shows up on Windows 10 desktop as a "disk". There you install the drivers by double-clicking on the 32/64 bit version of your host OS. It took five seconds. After that, with the SD card already installed on the SoC from the factory running Linux, I guessed that it was running ssh and VNC. I guessed the VNC address and it immediately came up!

Ordered the AdaFruit TFT display so that I can run this and other demos. Incredible the FPGA speedups, as you can see when the demo switches from FPGA to CPU:

More...
This demo worked exactly as advertised.

Copied the image to an sd-card. Replaced the sd-card that came with the SoC. Booted the SoC and there it was displaying the Mandlebrot set on the attached AdaFruit TFT at blazing speeds. Push the buttons on the SoC to control CPU or FPGA. All works perfectly.

Next is:

0) Assuming Altera gets me the 30 day trial this century;
1) Compile the helloworld.cl part and transfer the whole thing to the SoC and see if it runs.
2) Then compile the Mandelbrot example and move the image to the SoC and see that I can get a complicated example to work.

Then I can do almost anything.
 
I think building your own multicore power-server from standard parts is better than exotic solutions.

I'm shelving the OpenCL stuff as it doesn't fit my needs; standard multicore CPU with multithreading is sufficient for me.
If I need more computing power then I just need to replace the CPU with a more powerful one, ie. with more cores, and maybe also the board, but that's ok for me.
And also extending RAM is much simpler, nowadays 128 GB RAM is possible.
With fast interconnect (GbE or faster) one can also build a cluster from standard parts,
but before that happens one would take a CPU with the most cores, ie. 24 core or so.
That's more than enough for the stuff I do.
 
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Ok got a trial license. Had to set the environment variable to the license file, and then compiling hello world example as in one of the previous posts.

Holly cow! I started Compiling hello world five minutes ago, and it is still going!? I wonder if this is normal?
 
Oy vey. It eventually comes back with:

C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\OpenCL\Altera\exm_opencl_hello_world_x64_windows_16.0\hello_world>aoc device\hello_world.cl -o bin\hello_world.aocx --board c5soc
Error: Compiler Error, not able to generate hardware

Stuck again.
 
20160708_182519.jpg
Well at least I got this to work and it is very cool
 
Bought more RAM and now have 16GB. Same problem. This is annoying, but I suspect I am not doing something correctly.

Stuck
 
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