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Comment by cannonpr | Hacker News Reader

While it's nice finally having access to FPGA's on the cloud, it's still a shame that there isn't much going on with Open source development on FPGA's, on either the toolset or libraries/modules. Though this is largely due to manufacturer hostility. Maybe wider access and adoption might finally do something about this situation.

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Stanford has a research group specifically on this issue: https://aha.stanford.edu/

Yes, agree. Also, SDKs are quite expensive - while GPU vendors give theirs away for free. This might be one reason for relatively low adoption vs GPU.

I don't think that is it. The tools aren't open source free, but they are dollar free.

Xilinx is the leader in FPGAs and their tools are free. Lattice tools are also free. Not sure about Altera, who is #2.

I've worked multiple places that shipped products using only the FPGA vendor's free offerings. The FPGA vendors see the tools as a way to sell silicon.

Altera was acquired by Intel last year and they dropped the Altera brand - they are now Intel FPGA.

There is OpenCores the equivalent of Open Source for Verilog/VHDL http://opencores.org/.

I'm curious what workloads you would want to see run on the FPGAs that would justify a more open platform?

As it is, I think Amazon's approach for AMI Reserved Instance Marketplace [0] sales makes sense for the AFI packages -- I would think it would make sense for a vendor to develop, debug & maintain the accelerators I'm aware of.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/

I've used FPGAs for image processing. While OpenCL does accelerate this, at the end of the day it's still largely General Purpose Computation on a GPU. I'd love to be able to install a suite of Special Purpose cores for image manipulation, for example. Especially one that works with imagemagick, so that all the various libs compiled against it would just work.

Is anyone doing open hardware FPGAs (I don't mean reverse engineering proprietary FPGAs, I mean implementing new silicon)? Recently a RISC-V company implemented a simple 32 bit CPU on the ancient TSMC 180nm process. NRE was apparently quite affordable and turnaround time was a few months. So perhaps a startup could work on implementing a 1990s-era PLD in the same process, just as a starting point to judge market demand.

https://github.com/haojunliu/OpenFPGA/

http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

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