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Anyone reccommend a Dev card with highest bandwidth for External memory to PCIe ?

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Hi, 

 

Does anyone have experience or recommend a suitable development card and PCIe IP core to give the maximum throughput for external memory(DDR3) to PCIe(Gen2 initially)? 

 

There is an Altera DDR to PCIE ref design for stratix IV dev card and other solutions like PLDA's quickPCIe IP. 

 

I have done some development on a stratix IV gx card from Terasic and am getting 300MByte throughput using a DDR2 memory and Gen2 x8 PCIe core. This is limited due to how I configured the ddr2 to opcie core interface and using terasic IP which has bugs that require workaround giving significant impact on performance. i.e. we have to split each PCIE DMA req into 200k blocks and these actually get split into 8x128bit chunks with 9 cycles between each transfer therefore halving the bandwidth for each DMA req not to mention further reductions in bandwidth due to multiple DMA sequences. 

 

We would like a non royalty PCIe core that gives a maximum DMA transfer running as fast as the fastest external memory can offer therefore utilising the PCIe bandwidth more efficiently. 

 

Terasic's IP core is based on alteras dma_chaining_top reference design so I worry that this doesn't give the best bandwidth. Also we need to own/modify the IP that interfaces to the hardcore PCIe IP.  

 

Any recommendations appreciated.
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