Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
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Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
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Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
#2What's special about this?
Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
#3What's special about this?
These chips usually cost $1k-$2k when bought new individually from the manufacturer
Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
#4For what it's worth: if you have a FT2232H adapter hanging around (and if you don't, you should consider getting one), those adapters can easily be flashed to be compatible with Vivado:
https://docs.amd.com/r/en-US/ug908-vivado-programming-debugg...
Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
#5[deleted]
Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
#6Cool stuff.
Reminds me of recycling used Mining- or LED-Controllers as they can be bought on Ali and have quite capable FPGAs.
Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
#7For what it's worth: if you have a FT2232H adapter hanging around (and if you don't, you should consider getting one), those adapters can easily be flashed to be compatible with Vivado: https://docs.amd.com/r/en-US/ug908-vivado-programming-debugg...
At work we always have 20-30x FT2232H on stock.
They are super useful - they speak GPIO, I2C, SPI, parallel FIFO, etc.
And their pyFTDI Python lib is great.
Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
#8For what it's worth: if you have a FT2232H adapter hanging around (and if you don't, you should consider getting one), those adapters can easily be flashed to be compatible with Vivado: https://docs.amd.com/r/en-US/ug908-vivado-programming-debugg...
At work we always have 20-30x FT2232H on stock. They are super useful - they speak GPIO, I2C, SPI, parallel FIFO, etc. And their pyFTDI Python lib is great.
Just be careful as the counterfeit FTDI chips can have bad internal regulators etc. (Usually those small Red UART and GPIO breakout hobby PCB.)
Usually better to use the vendor supplied JTAG tools, or build your own with known good silicon. Recovering FPGA hardware is always a mixed bag of what IP and documentation is available to bring up the board. Looks like nice silicon though. =3
Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
#9Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+
#10Reminds me how Alibaba innovated in database space with a cluster of FPGAs doing LSM compaction with custom MySQL storage engine - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3299869.3314041
Basically they achieved massive improvements in throughput and latencies vs RocksDB, for some operations even an order of magnitude.
They even offered this as a service, but eventually pulled out. Not sure if they are still using it, but I was surprised that pretty much nobody else, as far as I am aware, is using any hardware acceleration for repetitive database workloads.