Platform Overview

Xilinx® Alveo® Versal® Data Center accelerator cards are PCI Express® compliant cards designed to accelerate compute-intensive applications such as machine learning, data analytics, and video processing in a server or workstation. The Vitis® core development kit provides verified platforms defining all the required hardware and software interfaces (shown in gray in the following figure), allowing you to design custom acceleration applications (shown in white) that are easily integrated into the Vitis Programming Model.

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Figure: Vitis System Overview

On the Alveo device above, a platform consists of a static region and a dynamic (DFX) region as shown below.

Note

The following diagram is generic and individual platforms may differ in terms of memory availability, DMA type and acceleration IP present such as AIE. Please see the user guides for a platform of interest.

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Figure Platform Static and DFX Regions

The static region of the platform provides the basic infrastructure for the card to communicate with the host server or workstation and hardware support for running user-defined DFX kernels. It includes the following:

  • Hardened PCIe endpoint to enable communication with external PCIe host (PG346)

  • Hardened DMA IP (PG347), NOC (PG313) and AXI infrastructure IP (PG247) for bulk Host ↔ Card memory data movement

  • Embedded Platform Management running on ARM RPU (AM011, UG1304)

  • Enablement of the APU running Petalinux (AM011, UG1304) for PS Kernel deployment

  • Clocking and reset for card bring-up and operation.

  • Peripherals responsible for board health and diagnostics, debug, and programming.

  • UART/I2C communication to external Satellite Controller (SC), QSFP, sensors and SC firmware updates from the host (over PCIe).

Accelerated RTL, HLS or PS kernels are deployed at runtime to the DFX region. The exact features and resources available for accelerated kernels are platform dependent.

Xilinx Support

For additional support resources such as Answers, Documentation, Downloads, and Alerts, see the Xilinx Support pages. For additional assistance, post your question on the Xilinx Community Forums – Alveo Accelerator Card.

License

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You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

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You may obtain a copy of the CC-BY-4.0 License at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.