Vitis™ unified software platform
Xilinx's Ultrascale+™ platform is a heterogeneous, Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) device, based on a 16 nm production technology. The Ultrascale+™ MPSoC Integrates a multicore processor subsystem, graphics processor, HEVC/AVC compliant video CODEC, and a broad range of peripherals, tightly coupled to the programmable logic. Ultrascale+™ MPSoC platform delivers ultra-high performance through the custom, hardware-optimized algorithm execution.
However, programming such a sophisticated device can be very challenging and limited to a very narrow range of engineers. Driven by this fact, Xilinx invested tremendous efforts to grant easy access to the broadest range of developers and data scientists. As a result, Xilinx developed Vitis™, a unified software platform that offers a rich set of features, enabling a broad range of developers from edge to cloud to unleash the power of Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards, allowing them to deliver truly differentiating applications to the market.
One of the most distinctive features of the Vitis™ Unified Software Platform is the ability to choose from a range of Domain-specific Development Environments. It allows developers to feel comfortable and unconstrained while they use a familiar Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of their choice. Xilinx's Vitis AI Development Environment is a specialized IDE that focuses on the development of hardware-accelerated AI inference. By offering support for the industry's leading deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and Caffe, and by integrating comprehensive APIs for pruning, compiling, and analysis of both custom trained and pre-trained models from the extensive Model Zoo repository, Vitis AI Development Environment represents a quantum leap in real-time AI inference development.
Vitis Accelerated Libraries support the most commonly used programming languages, such as C, C++, and Python. It allows developers to use their preferred programming language and seamlessly implement hardware acceleration to their applications. A set of accelerated domain-specific and common-function libraries enables the implementation of hardware acceleration with minimum effort and changes to the existing code. In addition to open-source hardware-accelerated libraries developed by Xilinx, developers are free to choose from a steadily-growing ecosystem of various partner libraries and pre-built applications.
Vitis Core Development Kit consists of a set of graphical and command-line tools, including compilers, analyzers, and debuggers, which are all accessible both from the Vitis IDE and a third-party IDE of choice. The core development kit also contains Xilinx Runtime Libraries (XRT), allowing interaction with the Target Platform. All the low-level operations, including configuring the PCIe interface, as well as the communication between the device and x86 application code, are taken care of automatically within the Vitis Target Platform layer, significantly reducing the complexity of the entire workflow.
The Vitis™ unified software platform offers scalability and flexibility, significantly reducing the development cycles. Applications can be seamlessly deployed across all Xilinx platforms, whether installed at the edge, on-premise, or in the cloud. Also, as already mentioned, Vitis hardware-accelerated libraries are open-source and are available to developers through GitHub.
