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So which company is the most open-source friendly provider of FPGA chips these days?
FPGA tools allow a lot of customization if you need it, what difference will it make if they are fully opensource? FPGA chip design isn't opensource anyway
There are cheap Virtex-6 and Kintex-7 boards as well ~$100-$150 on Aliexpress.
1) The boards are very bare-bones. Most of the I/Os are tied up in high-speed connectors like PCIe or SFPs, which will be very difficult for a beginner to work with.
2) The Virtex/Kintex parts they're using require a paid (or pirated) Xilinx license, and the sheer size of the parts makes compile times even slower than normal.
There are cheap Virtex-6 and Kintex-7 boards as well ~$100-$150 on Aliexpress.
The gotchas with those are that: 1) The boards are very bare-bones. Most of the I/Os are tied up in high-speed connectors like PCIe or SFPs, which will be very difficult for a beginner to work with. 2) The Virtex/Kintex parts they're using require a paid (or pirated) Xilinx license, and the sheer size of the parts makes compile times even slower than normal.
I'm curious: Would it be worthwhile porting the entire stack required for http(s) (tcp/ip, ssl, etc) to an fpga? Would it be faster than running it on a CPU?
I think really any task can benefit from being ported to FGPA, but FPGA clocks tend to be slower than CPU clocks and large logic will force you to lower the clock as components become more spread out on the chip (assuming all the logic elements needed even fit on your board). The caveat is that it's expensive to do things in hardware, and some things are already designed very well -- if you need to design a whole CPU from scratch on an FPGA to run your code it'll obviously be slower, but it will also take way too much time to get it anywhere near real world performance per clock. Since TCP/IP and SSL are mostly pretty specialized, the answer is yes. If you're interested, there's some open-source projects that do part of this https://github.com/fpgasystems/fpga-network-stack)
There are cheap Virtex-6 and Kintex-7 boards as well ~$100-$150 on Aliexpress.
The gotchas with those are that: 1) The boards are very bare-bones. Most of the I/Os are tied up in high-speed connectors like PCIe or SFPs, which will be very difficult for a beginner to work with. 2) The Virtex/Kintex parts they're using require a paid (or pirated) Xilinx license, and the sheer size of the parts makes compile times even slower than normal.
2. License is pain though, you can get a proper demo license for Kintex probably
3. Compile times for barebones projects are few times more for a larger FPGAs, but as you add IPs and stuff they take a few minutes on a fastest computer anyway
I'm curious: Would it be worthwhile porting the entire stack required for http(s) (tcp/ip, ssl, etc) to an fpga? Would it be faster than running it on a CPU?
What I never see mentioned are cheap FPGA dev boards that don't come with any peripherals. I guess those aren't worth the pain of adding the peripherals back on?