Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+ • Hacker News Board

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#61

Post by duskwuff » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 7:35 PM UTC

NoiseBert69 wrote: post #15

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not all FTDI series are faked. Only the most popular FT232 as far as I know. Same for ST. Only the STM32F103 is a well known bad actor in the market.

> Only the most popular FT232 as far as I know.

Specifically, the FT232RL - a simple USB-to-serial chip. (And many of the clones are actually quite high quality.) As far as I'm aware, the FT2232H - a more complex USB to various-serial-and-parallel-protocols chip - hasn't had a counterfeiting problem, although I believe WCH has made some compatible parts.

The STM32F103(C8) situation is pretty funny too. Most of the companies making clones have long since moved on from outright counterfeits and have started manufacturing their own more-or-less-compatible XYZ32F103 microcontrollers (e.g. GD32F103, AT32F103, APM32F103, CH32F103, HK32F103, etc).

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#62

Post by rfoo » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 7:44 PM UTC

That's cool. For those who happened to be in China right now, there's the same listing on a Chinese marketplace (idlefish) for only 480 CNY (~68 USD). That's... better than too good to be true. I'm going to have a try.

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#63

Post by duskwuff » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 7:51 PM UTC

sweetjuly wrote: post #59

synergy20 wrote: post #25

just received a kv260 board, i thought vivado is free to use?

Vivado has free and paid tiers. The free tiers ("WebPack") support their a myriad of their smaller devices (which includes the Kria boards). The larger devices (Virtex, etc.), however, are generally only supported by the paid versions of Vivado. 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).

The licensing scheme is not terribly robust, either; there are a number of cracked (full) licenses floating around if you know where to look. Given that AMD makes most of their money on hardware sales, and the software is only really useful in conjunction with that hardware, I suspect they don't care very much.

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#64

Post by matt-p » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #60

poizan42 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many Chip VID:PID listed in > 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 copycats are free to write thier own drivers though? They could even open source them. Why should they get to steal them from FDTI?

I do agree the cost of the chips are insane however, they're ultimately worth paying for because of the driver support and 'just works' factor.

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#65

Post by poizan42 » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 8:14 PM UTC

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #60

poizan42 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many Chip VID:PID listed in > 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…

> are considered copyrighted IP in North America.

Yes they may be, but in the Sega v. Accolade case I mentioned earlier it was decided that copying of both copyrighted and trademarked material for interoperability purposes is fair use. In that case Accolade had to literally embed "SEGA" inside their ROM and send the text to the Genesis III in order for it to boot their games. The Ninth Circuit court ruled that this constituted fair use.

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#66

Post by Joel_Mckay » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 8:29 PM UTC

matt-p wrote: post #64

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many Chip VID:PID listed in > 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 copycats are free to write thier own drivers though? They could even open source them. Why should they get to steal them from FDTI? I do agree the cost of the chips are insane however, they're ultimately worth paying for because of the driver support and 'just works' factor.

> copycats are free to write thier own drivers though?

Sure, anyone paying for a Microsoft certified hardware driver, USB PID allocation, and cert fees every year... Everyone else is not allowed in the OS we paid for...

It is a decades old serial port emulation chip... Racketeering with a computer should still be illegal. =3

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#67

Post by hxorr » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 8:43 PM UTC

poizan42 wrote: post #58

taneq wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The issue was, if I recall correctly, that the Microsoft CDC driver was quite buggy. This led to the situation where CDC device vendors were unwilling to produce CDC compatible devices, because the default Microsoft driver would be used and, of course, the blame for any bugginess gets pinned on the hardware vendor.

Hence the current situation of many CDC-type devices that are intentionally incompatible enough with the standard, in order to require the device vendor's own drivers which they can ensure meet their quality expectations

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#68

Post by mk_stjames » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 8:44 PM UTC

I don't see if they found out the pinouts for the SFP connectors on the back. If those were documented, and the PCI-e lanes were documented, I could see someone having some real fun with these building some bespoke fiber networking gear.

SFP transceivers are just that- transceivers, they will spit out what you put in, so you could even build some interesting bespoke fiber optic signaling gear with these, and a PCIe backplane, or just solo.

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#69

Post by random_duck » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 8:46 PM UTC

mk_stjames wrote: post #68

I don't see if they found out the pinouts for the SFP connectors on the back. If those were documented, and the PCI-e lanes were documented, I could see someone having some real fun with these building some bespoke fiber networking gear. SFP transceivers are just that- transceivers, they will spit out what you put in, so you could even build some interesting bespoke fiber optic signaling gear with these, and a PCIe b…

The SFP connector pinnouts are in the pinnout section.

Re: Alibaba cloud FPGA: the $200 Kintex UltraScale+

#70

Post by johndoe0815 » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 9:01 PM UTC

Is there any RAM on the board except for the on-chip block RAMs?

The ebay listing mentions 128 MB, but I wonder if this can be trusted since some other information in the "item specifics" overview is clearly bogus ("7-Function Digital Multimeter Shield").