Hong Kong, October 17, 2013 - Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced that its SDK for OpenCL has received certification for conformance to the OpenCL 1.0 standard and has been listed on the Khronos Group OpenCL conformant products list. Altera is the only company providing an OpenCL solution optimized for FPGAs. This solution enables software developers to accelerate systems by leveraging the massive parallel architecture of FPGAs. Altera showcased its OpenCL solution at the 2013 Linley Processor Conference held in Santa Clara, California on October 16-17.

By obtaining conformance certification, Altera can now provide a performance-validated cross-platform programming environment. Using this environment, algorithms can be dramatically accelerated with significantly lower power consumption compared to other computer hardware architectures. Altera achieved conformance by successfully completing over 8,500 conformance tests targeting high-performance Stratix® V FPGAs using its SDK for OpenCL. The tests included trials of continuously running Stratix V FPGA accelerator cards with error-free operation in server farms.

Alex Grbic, Altera's Software, IP, and DSP Marketing Director, stated, "Through continuous investment in OpenCL, Altera has been able to drive the industry to use FPGAs for accelerating computationally intensive applications. Altera's SDK for OpenCL has been adopted by several of the world's leading high-performance computing systems developers. These developers require Khronos Group OpenCL conformance, and as the only FPGA vendor to achieve this, Altera demonstrates that its solution is an immediately deployable solution."

OpenCL Ray Tracer Demonstration on Single-Chip SoC

Software developers can easily leverage the high-performance, low-power benefits that FPGAs provide.
Altera's SDK for OpenCL provides an industry-standard open-source programming interface, and Altera's Preferred Board Partner Program for OpenCL offers commercially available FPGA boards optimized for Altera devices. Various design examples demonstrating the benefits of using FPGAs in high-performance systems, along with the Preferred Board Partner list, can be found at www.altera.com/opencl.

In addition to supporting high-performance Stratix V FPGAs, Altera developed the SDK for OpenCL to support the low-power, low-cost Cyclone® V SoC, which integrates an ARM® Cortex®-A9 processor into a 28nm FPGA. Altera recently developed and demonstrated a complete heterogeneous system using the Cyclone V SoC with its SDK for OpenCL. This demonstration shows the acceleration achieved when performing ray tracing algorithms used in 3D graphics rendering using Altera's SDK for OpenCL and Cyclone V SoC. Compared to running the same algorithm entirely on a discrete ARM processor-based system, speedup improvements of up to 40x were achieved. Software developers unfamiliar with hardware design languages require no hardware expertise whatsoever to implement OpenCL kernels.

Altera SDK for OpenCL Demonstration at Linley Processor Conference

Altera demonstrated its OpenCL solution at the 2013 Linley Tech Processor Conference held in Santa Clara, California on October 16-17. The demonstration included a presentation titled "Deep Packet Inspection Implementation Using OpenCL Channels," which showed how to implement DPI applications using OpenCL with Altera FPGAs. Altera also showcased its SDK for OpenCL solution.