Unless you cut out floating point and superscalar, it requires a fairly large FPGA, on the order of >$1000. So you'd have to put it to serious use to break even with using AWS.

The other advantage of AWS is scale-out once you want to get benchmark data and not wait forever (or to simulate warehouse scale computers). In the past, maintaining our own FPGA cluster was a nightmare.

I haven't tried BOOM specifically, but if you're interested in a large FPGA that can be acquired very cheaply, you should look into the Pano Logic G2 thin client. They used to be available in bulk for $3 a piece, but those have now all been snapped up by hobbyists.

But you can still get them for $20 or so on eBay.

They have a Spartan-6 LX150 (DVI version, revB) or Spartan-6 LX100 (DVI version, revC), which are really huge FPGAs. It's by far the best deal in town if you're interested in that kind of stuff.

Google for "github panologic-g2" to find up-to-date proceedings about the reverse engineering effort.

Right now, the FPGA is up and running and outputting an image over DVI.

Do you have any idea about how many FFs are needed for a BOOM CPU?

I don't know anything about FPGAs, are all FPGAs compatible? Assuming this fits on an FPGA, does it work on every FPGA?

No, the IO plumbing and infrastructure are different. FPGAs are a total pain because each platform is different. :'(

I don't remember numbers (and resources aren't always apples-to-apples), but it's bigger than a Zedboard and 60% of a zc706 I believe. It's a ton of wires is the big issue I suspect.

Ok. The FPGA in a ZC706 is about double the size of the Spartan-6 LX150.

That's a lot of logic!

For this specific RISC-V variant, it seems like it requires relative expensive FPGAs. There are some other RSIC-V cores that you can play with which run on small and cheap FPGAs. I’ve played with the picorv/picosoc project on a TinyFPGA BX and those are easy to find (recently sold out at some shops but crowdsupply still has some of you can’t wait a month for the next batch of boards) and cheap.

There are also a lot of new FPGA dev boards with good community support for folks looking at getting their feet wet, like the icebreaker (crowdsupply) and alchitry (Kickstarter).