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> Transceivers – Up to 8 GTH transceivers supporting up to 16.3 Gb/s Hey, the Spartan line is useful again!
by smallmancontrov 3y ago
> Transceivers – Up to 8 GTH transceivers supporting up to 16.3 Gb/s
Hey, the Spartan line is useful again!
- morphle 3y agoFinally, I waited years for this. I could only use the Kitex line. Big question is will these Spartan Ultrascale+ with tranceivers and PCIe 4.0 be cheaper or more expensive?
- amirhirsch 3y agoThey have strong competition from Lattice and I really thought they had ceded the low-end to them already. For the PCIe chips you can figure out where the pricing must fall for a certain feature set, but I'd be surprised if the cheapest PCIe 4.0 part in the Spartan US+ family is under $500. Consider the Lattice Avant-X series as competitive reference: https://www.mouser.com/c/semiconductors/programmable-logic-ics/fpga-field-programmable-gate-array/?q=AT-X&m=Lattice&tradename=Avant&sort=pricing https://www.mouser.com/c/semiconductors/programmable-logic-i...
- morphle 3y agoStrong competition from Lattice? I might be missing something, but AFAIK Lattice certuspro-nx FPGA's are more expesive and so is the synthesis software.
- DannyBee 3y agoThey already supported this line rate though, for years? What am i missing? (IE It's still only pcie gen3, and this announcement doesn't change that)
- smallmancontrov 3y agoSpartan 6 had transceivers. Spartan 7 dropped them. Boo. Spartan UltraScale+ brings them back. Hooray! (Though to morphie's point we should probably hold the champagne until we see pricing.) Also, it looks like PCIe Gen 4. The bitrate is enough and the page says Gen4x8. Is there something I'm missing?
- morphle 3y agoYes, we are missing vital information. Similar issues as Artix Ultrascale+ where the small print says " PCIe Gen4 is available in AU10P and AU15P in the FFVB676 package. AU10P and AU15P in other packages support Gen3x8.". Same die for all these FPGAs but not same speeds at given prices. Most of the die will be disabled, 'binned'. So Spartan 7 Ultrascale+ can theoretically support 8 lanes of PCIe Gen 4.0, but if they actually do at the price you pay is unclear and also if the PCIe 4 IP is free or very expensive and only available in the expensive toolchain under NDA? [1] https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/device-family/nav-artix-ultrascale-plus.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/device-famil...
- pengaru 3y agoForgive my ignorance, and I made a brief attempt to answer it myself - what's GTH in this context?
- throwup238 3y agoIirc it stands for “gigabit transceiver high speed” or something. There is also GTX, GTY, GTP, etc which are different implementations of SERDES on Xilinx chips. It’s like USB full speed and USB high speed. They’re largely meaningless marketing terms just to differentiate generations.
- pengaru 3y agoThanks, that explains why all my search turned up was xilinx product materials...