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I disagree strongly. The major issue with FPGAs today is that they cost money (because they are chips). They cost even more than your CPU. So you can't treat th
by alain94040 12y ago
I disagree strongly. The major issue with FPGAs today is that they cost money (because they are chips). They cost even more than your CPU. So you can't treat them life software. To put it in simpler words: everyone has access to a CPU, less than 1% have access to an FPGA. Fix that* and the tooling will follow.
* one way to make FPGAs "free" is to incorporate some FPGA blocks in an Intel CPU. Then it will feel free.
- davexunit 12y agoIntel CPUs are anything but free. They contain nonfree microcode and other nastiness, so they would be unsuitable for free hardware projects.
- pogden 12y agoI think the grandparent is referring to 'free as in beer.' It doesn't cost anything to tinker with programming because almost everyone already has a computer they use for other things. Not so with FPGAs.
- femto 12y agoIt's the programming model, not the FPGA itself that people are asking to be free (as in freedom, not cost). Comparing to the world of software: the FPGA is analogous to the CPU, the programming model is analogous to the instruction set, the tool chain is analogous to the compiler and the hardware Description Language" is analogous to source code. The freedoms that apply to software/compiler/information can equally be applied to their analogue in the FPGA space. Incidentally, FPGAs start at US$1.24 in single unit quantities from Digikey, and go up from there. US$6.75 will buy a "proper" logic cell based FPGA. They are no more expensive than a CPU. A Zynq development board, which has 2 x ARM cores with integrated FPGA, can be had for US$119 [1]. https://adapteva.myshopify.com/collections/featured-products/products/parallella-16-micro-server https://adapteva.myshopify.com/collections/featured-products... --- Edit: fixed price on dev. board