Analysis and Comparison of Attainable Hardware Acceleration in All Programmable Systems-on-Chip

Zynq-7000 devices from Xilinx incorporate a dual-core processing unit running software, programmable logic that can be customized to implement different hardware circuits, and interfaces enabling interactions and data exchange between software and hardware components to be provided. Such devices permit complete solutions for embedded systems to be integrated on a chip. The paper compares different types of Zynq-based systems and studies communications between the processing unit and the programmable logic. Thorough evaluation of the available on-chip high-performance interfaces is done based on the results of numerous experiments. Two types of projects that are data sorters and popcount computations were chosen for particular assessments. We found that efficiency of software/hardware solutions depends on many mutually related factors such as the volume of processed data, applied parallelism, and involved high-performance ports. Concrete recommendations based on experiments and comparisons are given and discussed.