4 ms·

Interesting. Zynq-7020 is supposedly less than $50 in reasonable quantity, if you stay firm with the distributors. Xilinx are known for unpublished discounts,

Interesting. Zynq-7020 is supposedly less than $50 in reasonable quantity, if you stay firm with the distributors. Xilinx are known for unpublished discounts, using the discount code Altera :) BTW Couldn't you make a cheap FPGA into a frame buffer, not use a separate ARM chip?

ChuckMcM 13y ago
Couldn't you make a cheap FPGA into a frame buffer, not use a separate ARM chip? Yes you can, integration isn't as nice though. It's pretty reasonable to build a DDR3 memory controller into a Spartan3 or Cyclone4 and the ARM PMI bus. My sketch has the memory slaved to a DMA control dumping RGB888 into a Silicon Labs or TI HDMI 'phy' at the requisite rate to generate a 1080p/60 display. The thought being that the RAM would be 'display preferred' and processor access would be 'when available'. Not as nice as a direct memory interconnect but easy to add to pretty much anyone's standalone ARM chip. I was shooting for something like the Sun3 color framebuffer on the Sun 3/60 which was pretty easy to talk to an pretty much hard to imply I'm violating Patents since those documents are from the 80's. I couldn't get it much below $15 though, it is a 3 chip solution (RAM / FPGA / Phy). The Zynq absorbs both the RAM and the FPGA so I'm left with the physical interface. And in the Zynq case I actually get two CPU cores so one could conceivably do a full 3D software implementation in one CPU and have the other one run Linux and talk to it via a simple in memory mailbox protocol. The Zynq is also already soldered together and trying to get the Digilent plugon modules talking to the Spartan 3 dev board i had was looking dicey at best. :-) I can fantasize about Atmel doing a hard core of a simple Frame buffer but its not realistically in the 'likely' category.

4 ms·

Interesting. Zynq-7020 is supposedly less than $50 in reasonable quantity, if you stay firm with the distributors. Xilinx are known for unpublished discounts,

by neurotech1 13y ago

ChuckMcM 13y ago
Couldn't you make a cheap FPGA into a frame buffer, not use a separate ARM chip? Yes you can, integration isn't as nice though. It's pretty reasonable to build a DDR3 memory controller into a Spartan3 or Cyclone4 and the ARM PMI bus. My sketch has the memory slaved to a DMA control dumping RGB888 into a Silicon Labs or TI HDMI 'phy' at the requisite rate to generate a 1080p/60 display. The thought being that the RAM would be 'display preferred' and processor access would be 'when available'. Not as nice as a direct memory interconnect but easy to add to pretty much anyone's standalone ARM chip. I was shooting for something like the Sun3 color framebuffer on the Sun 3/60 which was pretty easy to talk to an pretty much hard to imply I'm violating Patents since those documents are from the 80's. I couldn't get it much below $15 though, it is a 3 chip solution (RAM / FPGA / Phy). The Zynq absorbs both the RAM and the FPGA so I'm left with the physical interface. And in the Zynq case I actually get two CPU cores so one could conceivably do a full 3D software implementation in one CPU and have the other one run Linux and talk to it via a simple in memory mailbox protocol. The Zynq is also already soldered together and trying to get the Digilent plugon modules talking to the Spartan 3 dev board i had was looking dicey at best. :-) I can fantasize about Atmel doing a hard core of a simple Frame buffer but its not realistically in the 'likely' category.