71–80 of 112 posts
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Sure, but this way his main account is not linked to his name.
Otoh, he could have just written "I've found this patent" and nobody would have known he was the author.
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That is pretty much the ARM and POWER problem too, they think they can grow in new markets with these hugely expensive machines in quantities of ten racks. Both would have significantly more traction if they offered a reasonable desktop class machine, but they don't seem to be able to do it. For some reason there are dozens of RPi type devices but making a $200-$300 device with a reasonable set of expansion ports (sa…
The underlying problem here is that the cost of making an SoC is enormous. So to make, say, an ARM desktop class machine you have only a few choices: 1) Make your own SoC designed for the purpose. You can tailor it to meet your requirements precisely, but given the low volumes you'll be selling, your system will be at least $10,000 a box, likely more. 2) Use a designed-for-mobile SoC. This will hit your $200-$300 pri…
[1]:https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M01/purchase.html
Tooling tooling tooling. FPGA hardware is cool but the tooling fucking sucks. Like stepping back into the time where you needed to pay thousands of dollars to get decent compilers and debuggers. The ability for anyone to develop software for CPUs at zero-cost is an amazing freedom. You literally cannot do that on certain fpgas--not only do they cost thousands, so do the tools to actually create a working design. Unti…
I have an iCEstick sitting in a drawer, for which some pretty amazing open source tools are available: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ I wish I had the time to play with it!
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The underlying problem here is that the cost of making an SoC is enormous. So to make, say, an ARM desktop class machine you have only a few choices: 1) Make your own SoC designed for the purpose. You can tailor it to meet your requirements precisely, but given the low volumes you'll be selling, your system will be at least $10,000 a box, likely more. 2) Use a designed-for-mobile SoC. This will hit your $200-$300 pri…
>The underlying problem here is that the cost of making an SoC is enormous. Broadcom designed a custom SoC for the Raspberry Pi 3 and everything still runs over USB 2.0.
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I have an iCEstick sitting in a drawer, for which some pretty amazing open source tools are available: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ I wish I had the time to play with it!
The fact that you don't is an indication of its true value.
If they do release something in this space they oughta make a SKU that can plop into a standard desktop socket on a standard motherboard. Electrical and computer engineering individuals want cheap big FPGAs too! (Speaking for myself of course.) Or just release a cheap pcie card! Cmon guys! Oh wait you've forgotten how important it is to get a developer community started around your hardware cause it's been so long si…
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I have an iCEstick sitting in a drawer, for which some pretty amazing open source tools are available: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ I wish I had the time to play with it!
The fact that you don't is an indication of its true value.
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I have an iCEstick sitting in a drawer, for which some pretty amazing open source tools are available: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ I wish I had the time to play with it!
The fact that you don't is an indication of its true value.
Tooling is 100% the thing keeping FPGAs back.
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FPGA's are extremely powerful, but the toolchain is absolute dog shit. Xilinx, shame on you. Intel, will you change anything here? The compound problem of this in reality is that finding the right people who have the right strain of semi-insanity to do this really well, is very slim. And most of them are tied up with a massive salary from some aerospace company such as Raytheon, GE, Honeywell, or someone like Philips…
HFT also still pays top dollar for competent FPGA developers. I'd wager they're willing to pay more than the listed industries too, especially if you factor in profit sharing and bonus structures.
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C (or really any traditional programming language) doesn't really map to an FPGA. There are some compilers out there that attempt to convert traditional C code to state machines for FPGAs, but FPGAs are really a completely different paradigm. You're actually describing digital logic, not a sequence of steps. That being said, there are soft-processors that have been written in VHDL/Verilog and can be incorporated into…
Oh that's not what I was implying, sorry for the confusion. I meant an open source, portable HDL compiler/synthesizer like what GCC/LLVM are for software. As the parent and many others point out in this thread the tooling is a really sore point for FPGA development. It's always big, clunky, often buggy closed source applications (often running on an unhealthy dose of Tcl scripts cobbled together). And of course if yo…
So you got terrible tooling and then a lock in into that tooling.
Not very appealing. Why the f--- would anyone use FPGA's unless they're the only option?