One of the effects of
adopting a High Level Synthesis design methodology is that the barrier between
"Systems designers" and "Hardware designers" is substantially reduced if not
totally eliminated. Suddenly, both "Systems designers" and "Hardware designers"
are using not only the same input language to specify their models (C++ /
System C) but they are also exposed to the same terminology. For this reason,
"Hardware designers" are suddenly exposed to two terms to which they have had
little or no exposure in the past.
The purpose of this
post is to clarify two "systems" terms that are usually confused and sometimes
used interchangeably: latency and throughput.
Definition of terms
Let us attempt to
define those two terms:
Latency is the time required to perform some action
or to produce some result. Latency is measured in units of time -- hours, minutes,
seconds, nanoseconds or clock periods.
Throughput is the number of such actions executed or
results produced per unit of time. This is measured in units of whatever is
being produced (cars, motorcycles, I/O samples, memory words, iterations) per
unit of time. The term "memory bandwidth" is sometimes used to specify the
throughput of memory systems.
A simple example
The following manufacturing
example should clarify these two concepts:
An
assembly line is manufacturing cars. It takes eight
hours to manufacture a car and that the factory produces one hundred and twenty
cars per day.
The latency is: 8
hours.
The throughput is:
120 cars / day or 5 cars / hour.
A design example
Now that these two
concepts are clear, let us apply these concepts to a problem "closer to home."
A designer is given the task to create hardware for a communications device that
has the following characteristics:
Clock frequency: 100MHz
Time available to
perform the computation: 1000ns
Throughput of the
device: 640 Mbits / second
Word width of each output:
64 bits
Let us translate
these requirements into latency and throughput measurements that are more
meaningful from the point of view of the hardware designer.
Latency: 1000 ns =
1000 ns * (1 s / 10^9 ns ) * ( 100 * 10^6 clock periods/ 1s) = 10^11/10^9 = 100
clock periods.
Throughput = 640
Mbits / s = (640 * 10^6 bits/s) * (1 word / 64 bits) * ( 1 s / 100 * 10^6 clock
periods) = 640 * 10^6 / 64 * 100 * 10^6
= 10 * 10 / 100 = 1 / 10 = 0.1 words / clock period.
The throughput could be
read more conveniently as follows: "one word every 10 clock periods"
Latency expressed in
clock periods, and throughput expressed in number of available clock cycles
between words, are parameters that a designer can use to create the desired
hardware according to the performance specifications.
A final
clarification
Some tools do not
express the throughput in units per unit of time but in clock periods. This is
incorrect but commonly used because of convenience. Therefore some tools would
report the throughput of our communication algorithm as 10.
This Team ESL
posting is provided by Dr. Sergio Ramirez, Sr Staff Product Engineer
for the C-to-Silicon Compiler high level synthesis product.