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Don't count on it. FPGAs are stupidly expensive, and those vendor-provided devboards are often sold below market price. Anything worth your time is stuck behind

by crote 2y ago

Don't count on it. FPGAs are stupidly expensive, and those vendor-provided devboards are often sold below market price. Anything worth your time is stuck behind a proprietary toolchain. Besides, there just isn't all that much you can realistically do with it. FPGAs shine at realtime processing of huge volumes of data, but you lack the necessary IO in a mobile form factor to do anything meaningful you couldn't already do with a CPU or GPU. The Precursor is a neat device, but in the end it's essentially a toy. The entire concept hinges on emulating a SoC with the FPGA, but a real SoC can offer an order of magnitude more performance at a tenth the price. It only makes sense if your risk model is a chip vendor putting backdoors in the SoC - but at that point why would you trust the FPGA? It's just moving the goalposts, really.

transpute 2y ago
> why would you trust the FPGA? AMD/Xilinx will use US-mainland TSMC fab for some FPGAs. > you lack the necessary IO in a mobile form factor Framework has pluggable I/O expansion modules.
- crote 2y ago
  You can also get SoCs which are manufactured in the US or Europe. Framework's IO modules are just USB-C. That's not really flexible or fast enough to really make a high-speed FPGA shine.
nathanmcrae 2y ago
The reason you would trust and FPGA more than a SoC is because putting in backdoors in an FPGA is much harder. If an FPGA is backdoored to the point where any soft core (whose layout kind be randomized to some degree) is compromised, then that would likely be obvious from the kind of inspections Bunnie has written about: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/infra-red-in-situ-iris-inspection-of-silicon/ https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/infra-red-in-situ-ir...
sockbot 2y ago
Why is it a toy just because it has an order of magnitude less performance? Computers became powerful enough for most people decades ago. I get much more utility out of a computer that grows capability in other aspects like mobility and power consumption.

by crote 2y ago

transpute 2y ago

> why would you trust the FPGA? AMD/Xilinx will use US-mainland TSMC fab for some FPGAs. > you lack the necessary IO in a mobile form factor Framework has pluggable I/O expansion modules.

crote 2y ago
You can also get SoCs which are manufactured in the US or Europe. Framework's IO modules are just USB-C. That's not really flexible or fast enough to really make a high-speed FPGA shine.

nathanmcrae 2y ago

The reason you would trust and FPGA more than a SoC is because putting in backdoors in an FPGA is much harder. If an FPGA is backdoored to the point where any soft core (whose layout kind be randomized to some degree) is compromised, then that would likely be obvious from the kind of inspections Bunnie has written about: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/infra-red-in-situ-iris-inspection-of-silicon/ https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/infra-red-in-situ-ir...

sockbot 2y ago

Why is it a toy just because it has an order of magnitude less performance? Computers became powerful enough for most people decades ago. I get much more utility out of a computer that grows capability in other aspects like mobility and power consumption.