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Comment by ChargingWookie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is incredible for fpga users. There is now a market for freelance fpga developers

Yes this is cool if you're already using FPGAs and yeah, there will be a market for FPGA designers.

But I also think this is FPGAs for the Rest of Us. Suddenly, FPGAs are available without having to buy some development board from Xilinx, install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain ...

Me, I was thinking of FPGAs as being something I'd use down the road a few years, eventually, etc. But instead, I'm looking at this right now. This morning. Waiting for the damn 404 to go away on:

https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga

This reduces the barrier to entry. It also reduces the transaction cost (h/t Ronald Coase).

> install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain ...

Did I miss some details? Don't you still need those shitty toolchains to do design/simulation before you'd deploy it?

Deploy? No. With the F1 instance, I can sell it without said toolchains. I need them to develop but not to deploy.

Edit: This isn't magic. This is availability. FPGA development remains hard.

It's not that simple, I think. FPGA development is extremely labor intensive, both in design and especially in verification and testing. Large scale designs increase both the time needed for synthesis, verification labor, and testing, by a lot. If you don't have extremely large scale or resource intensive designs, this probably isn't for you anyway. Making the FPGAs more readily available is good for a lot of reasons, and opens the market to some new stuff, but it doesn't necessarily dramatically change the true costs of actually developing the designs in the first place.

Basically, you're not going to deploy fabric live to your customers without having extensively tested it on your real world, production hardware setup, even if it's just a separate lab with identical hardware. That's going to be going on throughout the entire development lifecycle, and for anything remotely complex you can expect that to be a long process. You're going to be using that F1 server a lot for the development, so you have to factor in that cost. If you're a solo/small place you can probably amortize it somewhat thanks to The Cloud, however (reserved instances, on demand batching, etc).

I think this is going to be well outside the pricing range for most people to use for an extended period of time, which is necessary for learning a lot. Depends on the specs of the developer AMI, too, which comes with Vivado and everything. But synthesis can be insanely CPU intensive for large designs, so who knows how they'll spec it. It might cost more due to including a Vivado license. And you'll need to do extensive amounts of testing, no matter what you're doing, so be prepared to synthesize and test on "Real World" F1 instances, on top of simulating, testing, etc.

If you truly want to get started with FPGAs, you can do it on a small chip, with an open source Verilog toolchain, and open source place/route/upload. Textual source code -> hardware upload, open source. Today, for like $50! I think this is way better as a tool for educational purposes, and a lot cheaper. Also, you don't have to deal with a giant bundle of EDA crapware.

What you want is Project IceStorm, the open source Verilog flow for iCE40 FPGAs: http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ -- you install 3 tools (Yosys, Arachne P&R, IceStorm) and you're ready to go. It's all open source, works well, and the code is all really good, too.

You can get an iCE40 HX8k breakout board for $42, and it has ~8,000 LUTs. Sure, it's small, but fully open source can't be beaten and that's cheap for learning: http://www.latticestore.com/products/tabid/417/categoryid/59...

I think this is a much better route for learning how to program FPGAs, personally, with high quality software and cheap hardware -- just supplement it with some Verilog/VHDL books or so. There are pretty decent Verilog tutorials on places like https://www.nandland.com or https://embeddedmicro.com/tutorials/beginning-electronics for example.

You would think after 20+ years of FPGAs, commercial FPGA tools would be more usable and more productive than something a couple guys hacked together from reverse-engineering a small FPGA. But that hasn't been my (limited) experience. Hats off to the IceStorm team.

> buy some development board from Xilinx, install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain

You can start only with the toolchain's simulator, and then get a board from ebay for 50 bucks.

I would not count on these instances being useful for development.

The parts Amazon is using cost somewhere between $30K and $50K each. Hourly costs will be substantial -- it will likely be cheaper to buy an entry-level development board than to spin up an F1 instance every time you want to run your design.

(post author here)

You can do all of the design and simulation on any EC2 instance with enough memory and cores. You don't have to run the dev toolchain on the target instance type.

You can do some simulation on a computer, but it's much slower than real time, even for a small design. Prototyping PCIe communications is also difficult without real hardware.

Hi Jeff, Point of clarification for this: In instances with more than one FPGA, dedicated PCIe fabric allows the FPGAs to share the same memory address space and to communicate with each other across a PCIe Fabric at up to 12 Gbps in each direction.

Does that mean you can have FPGAs running on multiple F1 instances connected via the PCIe Fabric? It's not clear if this means FPGAs within a single F1 instance, or between multiple F1 instances.

Any recommendations on an entry-level development board?

If you are in the academic sector, pretty much everybody has an university program where one can get hardware/software for reduced prices or as a donation.

Personally, I started dabbling with a zynq zedboard. FPGA+Hard arm cores, many stuff on board + extension capabilities.

Digilent Arty [1]. XC7A35T, 256MB RAM, Ethernet, $99.

[1]: http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-board-artix-7-fpga-develop...

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