Platform performance comparison of PALM network on Pentium 4 and FPGA

When simulating very large, biologically plausible models on desktop computers, the memory bandwidth is the biggest bottleneck due to the significant performance difference between memory and processor. We did a performance analysis for different variations of the Palm association network implemented on Pentium 4 with VTune 6.1 performance analyzer. We also analyzed the performance of an FPGA implementing the same network. The FPGA performance is limited by the memory bandwidth and FPGA computation bandwidth, but continuous sequential memory fetch can be done more efficiently that in the Pentium 4.