51–60 of 102 posts
What's cool is that the Raspberry-PI V is just fast enough to run modern desktop software, including (ack!) Microsoft Teams. I was able to give a live demo of my FPGA design by sharing the desktop during a conference call.
My only complaint is, of course, lack of SoC documentation from Broadcom.
Say what you will about Intel, but they do provide full chip documentation if you go through their NDA process. With it, I made a very nice FPGA PCIe environment on Xeon Ivy Bridge: it let me save all of the PCI config registers, then reconfigure the FPGA, then reprogram them and have the chip show up on the bus without having to reboot the server or re-enumerate. The trick is to temporarily set the root complex bit to disable PCIe error detection during the reconfiguration process.
(Was using Altera Stratix-IIgx at the time).
There is possibly another way to this, but haven't tried it:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32334870/how-to-do-a-tru...
But even aside from that, with the documentation you have access to a lot of error reporting which is extremely useful during PCIe bring-up.
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Good, FR. Then you can send it back to who you bought it from. All vendors should do this.
The issue is (as I understand it) that some early supply chain distributors either unwittingly bought shipments of counterfeit parts, or otherwise ended up stocking them as genuine. Then legitimate hardware manufacturers used them. And let's be upfront here, any part using FTDI USB interfaces is low volume hardware that's either indie or, like, niche scientific gear. These are not chips you use when you have a 20-per…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good, FR. Then you can send it back to who you bought it from. All vendors should do this.
The issue is (as I understand it) that some early supply chain distributors either unwittingly bought shipments of counterfeit parts, or otherwise ended up stocking them as genuine. Then legitimate hardware manufacturers used them. And let's be upfront here, any part using FTDI USB interfaces is low volume hardware that's either indie or, like, niche scientific gear. These are not chips you use when you have a 20-per…
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Why the downvotes? My understanding ai is not a use for fpgas because models require a lot of ram (preferably fast ram) and fpga themselves don’t have a lot of it. An fpga will have pins you can attach fast ram, but then board layout and layering traces becomes very non trivial. Hence gfx cards (and a lot of them) are more suited.
FPGA will never be as fast as an ASIC. NV data center chips cant do graphics anymore, just compute.
Is anyone aware of any examples of FPGAs used to implement neural nets or other connectionist architectures? What's exciting about FPGAs is that they make "custom" chips affordable for colleges and even individuals... At this point in time, with the AI world fixated on LLMs, it seems that there's an opportunity for small groups/individuals to use FPGAs to experiment with more animal-like ground-up approaches to intel…
I just used the Raspberry-PI V to bring up the PCIe interface on a Lattice Certus-Pro NX "Versa" board, it's very convenient. What's cool is that the Raspberry-PI V is just fast enough to run modern desktop software, including (ack!) Microsoft Teams. I was able to give a live demo of my FPGA design by sharing the desktop during a conference call. My only complaint is, of course, lack of SoC documentation from Broadco…
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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
Also beware that FTDI has bricked swathes of gear that (often inadvertently) used counterfeit chips, via driver updates. So if you buy gear that uses an FTDI chip then if you’re unlucky want it turns out to be counterfeit, your thing might get bricked. :/
[0] Clearly allowed at least in the US under the decision in Sega v. Accolade
just received a kv260 board, i thought vivado is free to use?
It's inconvenient for hobbyists, sure, but for enterprise uses the cost of Vivado for a team is largely inconsequential (which I suspect is why they get away with this).
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Also beware that FTDI has bricked swathes of gear that (often inadvertently) used counterfeit chips, via driver updates. So if you buy gear that uses an FTDI chip then if you’re unlucky want it turns out to be counterfeit, your thing might get bricked. :/
Importantly not just counterfeit chips but also completely legal clone chips. For context, for a long time Windows did not have a driver for the CDC serial communication class out of the box. But FTDI had made good Windows drivers, and their interface was easy to clone. So for a time there was a market for making 3rd-party chips implementing FTDI's interface and copying their USB id to be recognized by their driver[0…
> lsusb
or
C:\> Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object { $_.InstanceId -match '^USB' } | Format-List
are considered copyrighted IP in North America. Many of the paid device codes are often not like other Communication Device Class drivers or free generic HID devices listed in the USB standard.
Early next year Windows 11 will be locking out unsigned drivers from the OS. Good for keeping the kernel more consistent, but could be bad for hobby hardware drivers.
Personally, I think it is ludicrous, but for 83% of users they have no other option than pay $6.32 for a $$0.43 chip. =3