Didn't xilinz released a high level development tool for fpga, using a c like language? One problem thought, it costs around 5k, so not hacker friendly. And

Didn't xilinz released a high level development tool for fpga, using a c like language? One problem thought, it costs around 5k, so not hacker friendly. And tool I know of is convey-computer which offers tools to develop fpga accelerators. It's not cheap, especially since decent fpga chips are expensive. Btw convey offers a more efficient memcached servers built using fpga chips. And I've read some academic work regarding a visual tool that let's bioinformatics guys program fpga chips. But since the zed board is priced reasonably for hackers , I wonder if it offers enough performance to be used as an accelerator?