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Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

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Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#61

Post by CalChris »

wyldfire wrote: post #59
CalChris wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is cool if you're already using FPGAs and yeah, there will be a market for FPGA designers. But I also think this is FPGAs for the Rest of Us . Suddenly, FPGAs are available without having to buy some development board from Xilinx, install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain ... Me, I was thinking of FPGAs as being something I'd use down the road a few years, eventually, etc. But instead, I'm looking at…

> install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain ... Did I miss some details? Don't you still need those shitty toolchains to do design/simulation before you'd deploy it?

Deploy? No. With the F1 instance, I can sell it without said toolchains. I need them to develop but not to deploy.

Edit: This isn't magic. This is availability. FPGA development remains hard.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#62

Post by aseipp »

CalChris wrote: post #47
ChargingWookie wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is incredible for fpga users. There is now a market for freelance fpga developers

Yes this is cool if you're already using FPGAs and yeah, there will be a market for FPGA designers. But I also think this is FPGAs for the Rest of Us . Suddenly, FPGAs are available without having to buy some development board from Xilinx, install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain ... Me, I was thinking of FPGAs as being something I'd use down the road a few years, eventually, etc. But instead, I'm looking at…

I think this is going to be well outside the pricing range for most people to use for an extended period of time, which is necessary for learning a lot. Depends on the specs of the developer AMI, too, which comes with Vivado and everything. But synthesis can be insanely CPU intensive for large designs, so who knows how they'll spec it. It might cost more due to including a Vivado license. And you'll need to do extensive amounts of testing, no matter what you're doing, so be prepared to synthesize and test on "Real World" F1 instances, on top of simulating, testing, etc.

If you truly want to get started with FPGAs, you can do it on a small chip, with an open source Verilog toolchain, and open source place/route/upload. Textual source code -> hardware upload, open source. Today, for like $50! I think this is way better as a tool for educational purposes, and a lot cheaper. Also, you don't have to deal with a giant bundle of EDA crapware.

What you want is Project IceStorm, the open source Verilog flow for iCE40 FPGAs: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ -- you install 3 tools (Yosys, Arachne P&R, IceStorm) and you're ready to go. It's all open source, works well, and the code is all really good, too.

You can get an iCE40 HX8k breakout board for $42, and it has ~8,000 LUTs. Sure, it's small, but fully open source can't be beaten and that's cheap for learning: http://www.latticestore.com/products/tabid/417/categoryid/59...

I think this is a much better route for learning how to program FPGAs, personally, with high quality software and cheap hardware -- just supplement it with some Verilog/VHDL books or so. There are pretty decent Verilog tutorials on places like https://www.nandland.com or https://embeddedmicro.com/tutorials/beginning-electronics for example.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#63

Post by nkkar »

tener wrote: post #54
wmf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any cryptocurrency that's profitably mineable on AWS the difficulty immediately increases to the point that it's no longer profitable.

Perhaps not for the entire time, but bear in mind that the prices of cryptocurrencies fluctuate and you can spin up the VMs when it is profitable and shut them down when it isn't.

Would this mean that the currency would never fluctuate below that price point?

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#64

Post by aseipp »

CalChris wrote: post #61
wyldfire wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain ... Did I miss some details? Don't you still need those shitty toolchains to do design/simulation before you'd deploy it?

Deploy? No. With the F1 instance, I can sell it without said toolchains. I need them to develop but not to deploy . Edit: This isn't magic. This is availability. FPGA development remains hard.

It's not that simple, I think. FPGA development is extremely labor intensive, both in design and especially in verification and testing. Large scale designs increase both the time needed for synthesis, verification labor, and testing, by a lot. If you don't have extremely large scale or resource intensive designs, this probably isn't for you anyway. Making the FPGAs more readily available is good for a lot of reasons, and opens the market to some new stuff, but it doesn't necessarily dramatically change the true costs of actually developing the designs in the first place.

Basically, you're not going to deploy fabric live to your customers without having extensively tested it on your real world, production hardware setup, even if it's just a separate lab with identical hardware. That's going to be going on throughout the entire development lifecycle, and for anything remotely complex you can expect that to be a long process. You're going to be using that F1 server a lot for the development, so you have to factor in that cost. If you're a solo/small place you can probably amortize it somewhat thanks to The Cloud, however (reserved instances, on demand batching, etc).

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#65

Post by krupan »

For complex designs the simulator that comes with the Vivado tools (Mentor's modelsim) is not going to cut it. I wonder if they are working on deals with Mentor (or competitors Cadence and Synopsys) to license their full-featured simulators.

Even better, maybe Amazon (and others getting into this space like Intel and Microsoft) will put their weight behind an open source VHDL/Verilog simulator. A few exist but they are pretty slow and way behind the curve in language support. Heck, maybe they can drive adoption of one of the up-and-coming HDL's like chisel, or create one even better. A guy can dream...

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#66

Post by krupan »

The traditional EDA tool companies (Mentory, Cadence, Synopsys) all tried offering their tools under a could/SaaS model a few years back and nobody went for it. Chip designers are too paranoid about their source code leaking. I wonder if that attitude will hamper adoption of this model as well?

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#67

Post by floatboth »

CalChris wrote: post #47
ChargingWookie wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is incredible for fpga users. There is now a market for freelance fpga developers

Yes this is cool if you're already using FPGAs and yeah, there will be a market for FPGA designers. But I also think this is FPGAs for the Rest of Us . Suddenly, FPGAs are available without having to buy some development board from Xilinx, install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain ... Me, I was thinking of FPGAs as being something I'd use down the road a few years, eventually, etc. But instead, I'm looking at…

> buy some development board from Xilinx, install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain

You can start only with the toolchain's simulator, and then get a board from ebay for 50 bucks.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#68

Post by ktta »

technological wrote: post #19

Quick Question: If anyone wants to learn programming an FPGA is learning C only way to go ? how hard is to learn and program in verilog/VHDL without electrical background ? If anyone suggests links or books, please do Thank You

I would suggest Digital Design by Morris Mano[1]. It'll start off with basic intro from digital gates to FPGAs itself! And you really don't need any EE background for this book. This book starts from absolute basics and it'll also teach you Verilog along the way. And verilog is used more in the industry than VHDL(which more popular in Europe and in the US army for some reason).

I'm surprised where you got the idea of using C to program FPGAs, are you thinking of SystemC or OpenCL (they're both vastly different from each other)

I'm really surprised a sibling comment recommended the code book. It really meant to be a layman's reading about tech. It's a great book but it won't teach you programming FPGAs.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-Introduction-Verilog-H...

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#69

Post by ktta »

nkkar wrote: post #63
tener wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps not for the entire time, but bear in mind that the prices of cryptocurrencies fluctuate and you can spin up the VMs when it is profitable and shut them down when it isn't.

Would this mean that the currency would never fluctuate below that price point?

not if you have a free-fall dump going on. This happens when investors lose hope in the long term future

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#70

Post by ranman »

ranman wrote: post #2

If you don't click through to read about this: you can write an FPGA image in verilog/VHDL and upload it... and then run it. To me that seems like magic. HDK here: https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga (I work for AWS)

If you guys are curious about these announcements I'll be recapping them and going into more detail on twitch.tv/aws at 12:30 pacific
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