Versal AI Engine Programming - 2022.1 English

Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Application Acceleration Development (UG1393)

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2022-05-25
Version
2022.1 English

As described in AI Engine Kernel Coding Best Practices Guide (UG1079) an AI Engine kernel is a C/C++ program that is written using the AI Engine API and specialized intrinsic functions that target the VLIW scalar and vector processors of Versal® AI Core devices, delivering over 100x compute performance than current server-class of CPUs.

The AI Engine kernel code is compiled using the AI Engine compiler (aiecompiler) that is included in the Vitis core development kit. The AI Engine compiler produces ELF files that are run on the AI Engine processors. Multiple AI Engine kernels are combined in an adaptive data flow (ADF) graph that consists of nodes and edges where nodes represent compute kernel functions, and edges represent data connections. The ADF graph is a Kahn process network (KPN) with kernels operating in parallel on data streams. The ADF graph interacts with the C++ and RTL kernels of the Vitis application acceleration flow, global memory, and the host application described here.

Refer to AI Engine Kernel Coding Best Practices Guide (UG1079) and Versal ACAP AI Engine Programming Environment User Guide (UG1076) for more information on developing Versal AI Engine applications.