Why do the synthesis in the cloud, and not locally?
I guess it's for people who only have a smartphone. Or a potato that is ok for browsing, but not for FPGA synthesis.
WebFPGA (2019)
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: WebFPGA (2019)
#12Why do the synthesis in the cloud, and not locally?
+1. Especially given that it can even run in the browser - https://yowasp.org/
Re: WebFPGA (2019)
#13(2019). What's the latest on sub-$100 FPGAs this decade, anything significantly better than the Mojo I picked up back in 2013 to tinker with?
Depends on what you're wanting to do.
The OSS toolchains have matured a lot since then, with parts from Lattice being fairly well supported if you don't want to touch a vendor's tooling.
Gowin have some of the more interesting new parts which sit on a different part of the cost/feature curve. The Tang Nano boards seem fairly popular but I only have experience with far larger GW5 parts.
The newer parts from Intel/AMD have increasingly impressive hard-peripherals and internal features, but not that relevant unless you know what you want/need.
Re: WebFPGA (2019)
#14My first thought: yet another web browsers standard.
Re: WebFPGA (2019)
#15Outside of hello worlds, I’m always struggling to find a use case for such small boards. Any ideas?
ICE40UP5K is large enough to synthesize a simple RISC-V CPU with some basic peripherals. It's not huge or fast, but it's capable enough.
Note, if you need a barebones CPU but want to save on gates, you can go with a serial (1-bit) CPU, e.g. SERV which only takes up 198 LUTs on ice40,[1] leaving plenty of space to do other things.
Re: WebFPGA (2019)
#16Outside of hello worlds, I’m always struggling to find a use case for such small boards. Any ideas?
small what boards? Do esp32 boards count?
Presumably small FPGA boards, like the $47 one in the linked article
Small boards have less I/O pins than larger boards typically, and small/cheap FPGA chips on small boards are also more limited than larger, more expensive parts.
Edit: precise price.
Re: WebFPGA (2019)
#17Would a direct pitch to some HFT shops works better than kickstarter, to raise money for FPGA related work? They are ones of the main users in term of production usage. This project might be useful for them, for training / PoC / quick prototyping.
Re: WebFPGA (2019)
#18Outside of hello worlds, I’m always struggling to find a use case for such small boards. Any ideas?
I've started to dabble in this only very recently. I have two iCEBreaker boards [0] in the mail right now that I'm excited for. From what I understand, one of the big advantages of the up5k chip (the same chip on the webfpga and the icebreaker) is that there's an open toolchain that runs in seconds (at this chip size), which is not the case in the closed/Vivado/"typical fpga" part of the world. (feel free to correct…
A trick to fit language models of this size it to remove the word to embeddings from the NN, and have a database to look up a dictionary of words and their embeddings. This way the LLL only need the "core" and you do the reverse for loopup again (kind of Text->RAG->LLM->RAG->Text). Have an example here: https://punnerud.github.io/pyspell/
The example have a limited language of around 1000 words, but make it possible to do Python (like) programming with LLM on an ESP32.
Re: WebFPGA (2019)
#19Outside of hello worlds, I’m always struggling to find a use case for such small boards. Any ideas?
ICE40UP5K is large enough to synthesize a simple RISC-V CPU with some basic peripherals. It's not huge or fast, but it's capable enough.
You mean it's large enough to synthesize several application specific RISC-V cores and let them form an embedded distributed system.
Re: WebFPGA (2019)
#20Outside of hello worlds, I’m always struggling to find a use case for such small boards. Any ideas?
performing glitch attacks on embedded systems, consoles, phones etc.