Evaluating The Highly-Pipelined Intel Stratix 10 FPGA Architecture Using Open-Source Benchmarks

Intel Stratix 10 FPGAs offer a novel architectural feature called HyperFlex that enables an extreme degree of pipelining resulting in up to 1GHz clock frequencies. Prior work has evaluated HyperFlex on pre-production Stratix 10 FPGAs using internal designs not accessible to the general public. This paper presents an updated evaluation of HyperFlex on the latest publicly-available production Stratix 10 FPGA using open-source benchmarks. In particular, our evaluation started with seven RTL designs from existing open-source projects, carefully chosen to capture a variety of architectures (simple pipeline to pipeline with loop/M20Ks/DSPs) implementing well-known functions such as crypto, math, and image processing. An FPGA developer who was not an expert in HyperFlex then spent around 250 engineering hours to develop 24 optimized versions of these designs, following the Intel Stratix 10 FPGA HyperFlex optimization guide. Those optimized designs run at 400MHz to 850MHz. In this paper, we describe the optimizations, efforts, and results. Upon publication, those optimized designs will be open-sourced and published in GitHub.