GIGABEE DDR3 perfromance

[mlefevre]

Hello every one,

I have just finish a test on the LX45 Gigabee Board.
I have have tested MCB3 DDR3 chip. It works fine

I am running the test on 50Mhz microblaze with 333Mhz memory controller, and i am measuring 26.3Mio/s during 32 bits write access to DRR3 and 14.3 Mio/s during 32 bits read access to DRR3.
It seems a bit slow.. Is that the kind of performance expected?

[Ales Gorkic]

Hi mlefevre,

The performance you are mentioning is normal. Microblaze is a slow processor, but performance can be increased  with:
Caching
Higher frequency
Processor configuration (area optimized significantly reduces performance)
Memory controller and AXI bus width

The real bandwidth is in FPGA logic. For example to move data you implement DMA and to process it you need some parallel processing core. The AXI_DMA can achieve 900MB/s of sustainable bandwidth at 128bits@62MHz (tested on one memory bank of GigaBee). With parallel processing in the FPGA logic you can achieve unbelievable performance if compared to sequential processing (compared to PC).
But this can only be achieved using RTL programs (this is not C code!).

Best regards,

Ales

[mlefevre]

Ok,Cool

Thanks