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I'm surprised he doesn't talk much about direct cost (rather than engineering cost). A decent FPGA developer kit will cost several thousands of US$, more expensive even than high end GPUs.
I'm surprised he doesn't talk much about direct cost (rather than engineering cost). A decent FPGA developer kit will cost several thousands of US$, more expensive even than high end GPUs.
You can buy this dev board to play around with and learn FPGA for $75, and it has extensive documentation and resources to help you https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11953
However if you're doing the sort of work which isn't just hobbyist stuff, you're going to spend 1000s on a board. This is the sort of thing commercial developers will be using: https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/ek-v7-vc707-...
For "classic" CPUs (aka x86 cpus with a proprietary frontside bus and southbridge bus) it can be challenging to work an FPGA into the flow. But the problem was pretty clear in 2007 in this Altera whitepaper[4] where they postulate that not keeping up with Moore's law means you probably end up specializing the hardware for different workloads.
The tricky bit on these systems is how much effort/time it takes to move data and context between the "main" CPU and the FPGA and then back again (Amdahl's law basically). When the cost of moving the data around is less than the scaling benefit of designing a circuit to do the specific computation, then adding an FPGA is a winning move.
[1] https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/prod-adv...
[2] http://www.stretchinc.com/index.php
[3] https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-ult...
[4] https://www.intel.com/content/dam/altera-www/global/en_US/pd...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can buy this dev board to play around with and learn FPGA for $75, and it has extensive documentation and resources to help you https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11953
But that's not a high performance FPGA. Believe me, I have a ton of FPGAs at home (starting even cheaper than that), and I write about them all the time: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=fpga However if you're doing the sort of work which isn't just hobbyist stuff, you're going to spend 1000s on a board. This is the sort of thing commercial developers will be using: https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/ek-v7-…
Is there high performance FPGA that does not depend on proprietary bloated windows-only toolchain?
Supposedly some of the Xilinx 7 series FPGAs have been reverse engineered so there is a possibility of supporting them in Yosys (which is reasonable free toolchain). I've not been able to get much information about this, but you can check on the website: http://www.clifford.at/yosys/
> 2. What synthesis targets are supported by Yosys?
> Yosys is retargetable and adding support for additional targets is not very hard. At the moment, Yosys ships with support for ASIC synthesis (from liberty cell library files), iCE40 FPGAs, Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs, Silego GreenPAK4 devices, and Gowinsemi GW1N/GW2A FPGAs.
> Note that in all this cases Yosys only performs synthesis. For a complete open source ASIC flow using Yosys see Qflow, for a complete open source iCE40 flow see Project IceStorm. Yosys Xilinx 7-Series synthesis output can be placed and routed with Xilinx Vivado.
[emphasis mine]
Aren't FPGA's used mostly to test/design a circuit that you would then go on to actually fabricate/build? I could be wrong but I thought FPGA's were stateless (meaning if they powered off/reboot you loose everything and have to set it up from scratch again).
We use FPGAs in cell sorting because we need to make decisions off of high dimensional data with low latency. The cells moving through our system have velocities higher than 1 m/s. They flow past a set of lasers and wind up in a droplet less than a millisecond later so we need to make a decision whether or not to sort a droplet within that time frame. We don't use ASICs because we don't move enough volume to justify the startup cost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's not a high performance FPGA. Believe me, I have a ton of FPGAs at home (starting even cheaper than that), and I write about them all the time: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=fpga However if you're doing the sort of work which isn't just hobbyist stuff, you're going to spend 1000s on a board. This is the sort of thing commercial developers will be using: https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/ek-v7-…
If you're building a commercial product, a 3k dev board sounds incredibly cheap. My company spends orders of magnitudes more on licenses for an IDE extension (resharper).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they retain state. We used an Altera DE1 in school and it retained our burnt in program until erased or reprogrammed
Probably burned into an external EEPROM or flash, the FPGA fabric itself still has to be configured by some external means. It's pretty fast but on-the-fly reprogramming of the FPGA logic is still an issue where you want to very quickly switch the logic on the FPGA.
I've always thought FPGAs would be perfect to have hardware backed video decoding/encoding that could adapt to new codecs (like vp9) while also being updatable for new performance improving discoveries. It also seemed like it would go well with a generic radio subsystem, so you could compile hardware support for new wireless standards that come out after your hardware did (essentially an fpga sdr). It seems like ther…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they retain state. We used an Altera DE1 in school and it retained our burnt in program until erased or reprogrammed
Probably burned into an external EEPROM or flash, the FPGA fabric itself still has to be configured by some external means. It's pretty fast but on-the-fly reprogramming of the FPGA logic is still an issue where you want to very quickly switch the logic on the FPGA.