How Does an FPGA Work?

Re:How Does an FPGA Work? by phendrenad2 on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @03:46PM (#35806779)

MiSTer makes me kind of sad, the DE10-nano board it's based on is 7 years old at this point, and the actual FPGA chip on the board is probably over twice as old as that. And this is still the peak of hobby FPGA chips. I wonder why Moore's Law is hitting the FPGA industry particularly hard all of a sudden.

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Re:How Does an FPGA Work? by willis936 on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @04:01PM (#35806995)

There are better FPGA options, they're just more expensive. The DE-10 Nano was strategically chosen as "powerful enough to meet most wants while still being within a reasonable budget".

No one's going to plunk down $10k for a 19 EV Zynq UltraScale+ with 1.1M LEs, but they will spend $200 on a Cylcone V with 210k LEs.

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Re:How Does an FPGA Work? by fooblaster on Thursday May 04, 2023 @03:14AM (#35812289)

There are mpsoc ultra scale+ chips that are under 100$ these days, so I think that's not true anymore. Even low end mpsoc ultrascale fabric is way better than that old altera stuff, with lut4 clbs, ultraram, and better dsp blocks. I've had the fabric run at 500 mhz in my designs.

https://www.avnet.com/wps/portal/us/products/avnet-boards/av...

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Re:How Does an FPGA Work? by rtkwe on Thursday May 04, 2023 @10:54AM (#35816331)

The issue with any other board is that the boards aren't going to have all the same ports and compatibility so you'd have to have potentially two largely separate forks of the cores and accessories which would be tough in a relatively small community like the Mister. For example your board doesn't have the large pin headers used by basically every Mister accessory so at a minimum you'd need an adaptor to go from some other port on your board to the pinouts that the mister ecosystem is built on.

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Re:How Does an FPGA Work? by phendrenad2 on Thursday May 04, 2023 @11:16AM (#35816715)

What kills that board (and many like it) is the absolutely proprietary SYZYGY connector, which is surface-mount (so hobbyists won't develop a board ecosystem for it, and aliexpress circuit cloners won't do their thing unless there's a proven ecosystem), and probably $10 in high quantities (if it's even in stock). RIP.

I'm not even sure that board has enough overall I/O to connect a VGA output, controller inputs, and a SDRAM chip (all of which are essential to a viable MiSTer replacement - note that no one has figured out how to use DDR RAM for emulation yet, too much seek latency).

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