What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service

Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by brian-armstrong on Sunday December 11, 2016 @07:28PM (#13154508)

If you're looking to learn an HDL on an FPGA, it's probably still cheaper and easier to just buy your own, maybe something like http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-board-artix-7-fpga-develop... ($99). And for that matter, you can also get started by just using a sim and no FPGA for free

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by vvanders on Sunday December 11, 2016 @08:24PM (#13154792)

If you don't care about the DSP units you can pick up a CPLD kit for ~$20 [1].

[1] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconduct...

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by duskwuff on Sunday December 11, 2016 @09:26PM (#13155050)

You can also get a "real" -- albeit small -- FPGA from Lattice for $25:

http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/lattice-semiconduct...

The Arty is a much more capable board, though.

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by thatcat on Sunday December 11, 2016 @09:37PM (#13155092)

What do you like about the Arty?

I'm considering the parallella board, which is around the same price.

https://www.parallella.org/board/

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by duskwuff on Monday December 12, 2016 @02:42AM (#13156344)

Between the two I'd recommend the Arty without hesitation.

The Parallella is intended as a demonstration board for the Epiphany SOC. The $99 model has no GPIOs or JTAG interface, making it essentially unusable for FPGA development; the higher-end models will still be awkward to work with.

The Arty is intended for FPGA development, and is much better suited for it -- built-in JTAG controller, lots of GPIOs on easily accessible connectors, user I/Os, etc.

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by CountSessine on Monday December 12, 2016 @04:37AM (#13156841)

Ok - I guess I'll mention Papilio - basically a Xilinx FPGA on a board. The Spartan 3 version is as cheap as $38 and the Spartan 6 with an HDMI phy is $75.

http://papilio.cc

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by zw123456 on Sunday December 11, 2016 @07:40PM (#13154582)

I agree, the devkit boards are very reasonable now days. I think the part that should be in the cloud is the SDK's. The synthesis is the most computationally expensive part and you could cut compile times down by an order of magnitude if you could run you dev on big iron.

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by j_s on Sunday December 11, 2016 @10:13PM (#13155211)

Thanks for the link!

Here's the discussion I found from nearly two years go when looking for more about this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9863475

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by phamilton on Monday December 12, 2016 @12:30AM (#13155803)

Is there one that works with Mac? I have an old one in a box that I haven't succeeded in getting running and I don't anything other than a MBP to run on (and I really don't want to do boot camp...)

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Re:What It Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service by sonium on Monday December 12, 2016 @03:48AM (#13156619)

I have actually been looking into this the past couple days:

* The opensource toolchain of icestorm [1] is the only thing running natively on mac.

* Most people run the vendor SDK on virtualbox under windows.

* I heard also of people using wine/playonmac in rare cases.

* I have tried installing the Icecube2 SDK from Lattice virtualized under Linux, because I didn't want to sacrifice the ~30GB discspace for a virtualized Windows. The installation was painful to say the least and I could not get it working on a recent Ubuntu versions because their license manager (Yes, the software is still free) has trouble with the network interface names (expects an eth0 interface).

[1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

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