Setting up the Project for Performance Estimation

To create a project and use the Estimate Performance option in a build configuration:

  1. Create a new project in the SDx™ IDE 2017.1 (lab2) for the ZC702 platform and Standalone as System configuration using the design template for Matrix Multiplication and Addition.
  2. Click on the tab labeled lab2 to view the SDx Project Settings. If the tab is not visible, in the Project Explorer double click on the project.sdx file under the lab2 project.
  3. In the HW Functions panel, observe that the madd and mmult functions already appear in the list of functions marked for hardware – template projects in the SDx environment include information for automating the process of marking hardware functions.
  4. If the HW Functions panel did not list any functions, you would click on the Add HW Function icon to invoke a dialog for specifying hardware functions. Ctrl-click (press the Ctrl key and left click simultaneously) on the madd and mmult functions in the Matching elements: list and notice that they appear in the Qualified name and location: list.
  5. Performance estimation can be run using any build configuration. Instead of selecting Debug or Release as the Active Configuration, you could instead click on the Manage build configuration for the project icon next to the active configuration.
  6. You can choose an available configuration or you can create a new configuration. New configuration can be created from an existing configuration (as a starting point) or it can be created from scratch. Using the Debug build configuration or another build configuration copied from Debug will compile the code with -O0 using GCC, so the software performance will be significantly degraded. For this lab we will use the Debug configuration.
  7. In the SDx Project Settings in the Options panel, check the Estimate Performance box. This enables the estimation flow.
  8. The Build toolbar button provides a drop-down menu for selecting the build configuration and building the project. Clicking the Build icon builds the project. If the Estimate Performance option is checked, then performance estimation also occurs. Click the Build button on the toolbar.

    The SDx IDE builds the project. A dialog box displaying the status of the build process appears.

    After the build is over, you can see an initial report. This report contains a hardware-only estimate summary and has a link that can be clicked to obtain the software run data, which updates the report with comparison of hardware implementation versus the software-only information.