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Comment by striking | Hacker News Reader

I remember this article. This is by _yosefk.

I love FPGAs. They're awesome for interacting at a low level with just about any kind of hardware, at nano-second-level latency.

But although I bought one, I don't think most people will end up buying one, unfortunately; the vast majority of the consumer stuff that we considered putting on FPGAs in the past (graphics rendering, heavy math) is solved six ways to Sunday by today's GPU. The FPGA also lacks an open-source (or even shared-source) toolchain, there's no way to perform resource sharing, they have code constraints that are physical limits, and so on.

Basically, FPGAs rock when used for chip design or for powering custom prototype or small batch hardware. But they fall into a really narrow portion of the market, because there are few cost-effective consumer-level solutions that make use of FPGAs.

A shame, really. They're super cool.

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You can always spend $40 and use this to play with one: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

Oh, wow. I have never seen this before. That's enormously useful and could be a huge step towards getting FPGAs on the "maker" market. Thanks for the link!

I agree with this. I've always wanted to use an FPGA for something cool, but never found a need. (I'm a hobbyist, fwiw).

They fall in a middle ground between things I can build more simply with a super cheap microcontroller (I buy Arduino nanos for $2, for example), and things I really need GPU compute for. So I'm stuck. I keep thinking I'll do a DSP project soon, but that's more because it is one of the few things I think an FPGA will be useful for, than because I need it.

So cool, yes. Practical, maybe - but not very, at least for me.

Bunnie Huang (Novena laptop) talks mention how they reverse engineered ISA by MitM the CPU through the FPGA on the Novena's board. That's as cool as epic.

That is pretty epic

He did it in a hotel room in a foreign country. He, Tarnovsky, Nohl and Goodspeed just blow my mind.

Things like the ZINC by Xilinx are working its way into things like the Red Pitaya[1] which is absolutely remarkably capable for the price range, but yeah FPGA's are pretty niche for the common end-user. Lithography on sil wafers ends up being cheaper at nearly any scale. It turns out more economical just to do that one of those cheap FPGA-to-ASIC conversion dealies (rather than using Cadence or whatever VLSI tooling you have to DFM from the start [I think UC Berkeley has a full architecture/RTL/logic/circuit/physical kit]) at the threshold of around a few thousand units.

[1] http://store.redpitaya.com/red-pitaya-board-36.html

>The FPGA also lacks an open-source (or even shared-source) toolchain,

I think this point is overstated. FPGAs are not microprocessors. I don't think an OSS toolchain would be anywhere near as beneficial as something like gcc. It would be nice to have but it's hard to think of any problems specific to programmable logic that this would address.

What would help is toolsets with less friction and less of an entry barrier.

Implementing your own routing algorithms, running these procedures in parallel on a cluster (something like distcc) and things like that would really benefit FPGA industry. The area is full of research problems, but only Xilinx progarammers and a few other companies are allowed to do research in this area and try their ideas. Well, some file formats are open (xdl/ncd files), but you have to reimplement everything from scratch.

Low end FPGAs are used very widely in the consumer products. STBs are probably the most numerous.

STB's? Forgot what that one meant.

Sorry for the media business argot, it's a set-top box (yes, people still call them this way, with all the flat panels around).

Oh yeah, that makes sense. Esp for DRM or I/O.

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