(post author here)

You can do all of the design and simulation on any EC2 instance with enough memory and cores. You don't have to run the dev toolchain on the target instance type.

You can do some simulation on a computer, but it's much slower than real time, even for a small design. Prototyping PCIe communications is also difficult without real hardware.

Hi Jeff, Point of clarification for this: In instances with more than one FPGA, dedicated PCIe fabric allows the FPGAs to share the same memory address space and to communicate with each other across a PCIe Fabric at up to 12 Gbps in each direction.

Does that mean you can have FPGAs running on multiple F1 instances connected via the PCIe Fabric? It's not clear if this means FPGAs within a single F1 instance, or between multiple F1 instances.

Any recommendations on an entry-level development board?

Digilent Arty [1]. XC7A35T, 256MB RAM, Ethernet, $99.

[1]: http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-board-artix-7-fpga-develop...

If you are in the academic sector, pretty much everybody has an university program where one can get hardware/software for reduced prices or as a donation.

Personally, I started dabbling with a zynq zedboard. FPGA+Hard arm cores, many stuff on board + extension capabilities.