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Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

To save you the digging, the chips are Xilink VU9p UltraScale series : https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/virtex-...

(retracted, can't find exact part on digikey) Quantity 1 pricing is about $2000/chip ; however, that price would no doubt drop substantially at even a 1000 chip order. A typical discount (appears to be) 20% at qty 100; so at qty 1000, maybe 33%? So 1 of these chips might be $1200 after you figure a bunch of other discounts?

EDIT:

https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/virtex-...

^^^ the product table.

The XCVU9P is listed as having ~6800 DSP slices, 2,2586K (= ~2.5 million) of system logic cells. That pretty much matches what Amazon describes as them using.

(The DDR-4 RAM is external - so it doesn't help narrow down the device.)

However there are multiple, very similarly named parts, and it doesn't seem that the XCVU9P is listed on Digikey. Other parts named UltraScale are - thus the confusion.

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These aren't the basic VU9x's. The specs put them somewhere around the highest end card on that series: the XCVU37P, with 64GB DDR4 and 2.8 million cells/7k DSPs.

That isn't a $2k card attached over fabric... It's probably closer to a $40,000 card.

I didn't find that in the AWS docs. Can you point me to where this is mentioned?

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/, ctrl+f "F1". They're vague about the exact part number (none of the listed Xilinx parts perfectly match, so it's likely they got first run of these specific parts or something[1], the prices are just eyeballing based on the listed parts page), but the basic specs are there including the RAM, DSP and logic elements.

[1] Xilinx also released Vivado 2017.1 today which is required for these UltraScale+ Virtex devices, so I'm assuming this isn't a coincidence.

I thought they'd be in the thousands but $40,000!? Holy crap! Is there a good reference you have breaking down the families, sizes, and prices all in one place?

Not really, I sort of just ballparked it (pulled it out of my ass) based on the available numbers you can get from some vendors like Digikey, or Arrow. Go search out the UltraScale+ Virtex devices there, in individual quantities, and they'll range in the $20k space easily at the higher end.[1]

These particular cards seem to be otherwise unobtainable and the series isn't exactly listed anywhere I can see. They're clearly at the high end, close to those listed ones, though.

Plus, and someone correct me, because I could be very, very wrong -- those $20k numbers are only for the literal chips you get, I think, not counting the actual necessary "surrounding" device. You get surface mounts. So the actual connecting fabric and everything is going to drive the price up even higher.

That said, I doubt Amazon is obviously paying $30-40k a device... I bet they get absurd margins at these rates. Just the lowly individual purchasers would pay that price. (Aside from just literally buying in huge quantity, there's probably some element where they can say "We are Amazon, give us deals.")

[1] https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/...

Digikey is a terrible price indicator though.

A good first order estimate for FPGAs is a factor of 10 between digikey pricing and volume price.

I think the parent comment to yours (or at least the edited version) is right, they are almost surely XCVU9Ps based on the logic element and DSP counts. The ram numbers listed in the product table are embedded memories (BlockRAMs in Xilinx-speak), DDR4 wouldn't be a spec-feature of the FPGA as it's external to the part on the PCB.

Avnet web pricing is $27k for the -1 speed grade, extended (not industrial) with 12-week lead. Safe to say Amazon is getting a better deal on both counts.

I suspect the add-in card itself is either this or something similar to it, based on specs etc. http://www.bittware.com/xilinx/product/xupp3r/. I didn't see pricing info readily available for that, but a similar card with less on-board DDR4 runs about $7k straight from Xilinx: https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/ek-u1-vcu118...

Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot to add: I thought it was funny that Amazon's page referred to "logic elements" given that this was traditionally an Altera term - Xilinx preferred/prefers "logic cells".

Thanks for your correction, you're totally right. I have no idea why I confused BRAMs with DDR4 on the board...

That pricing sounds waaaay too low to me; these are big, cutting edge parts, basically unobtainium at the moment unless you have a close relationship with Xilinx. When they reach the channel they will not be cheap either.

https://octopart.com/search?q=xcvu9p

I checked pricing for qty 1 via digikey.com in USD, choosing the part that was about $2k as it seemed closest to the specs I could find mentioned in the joint Xilinx/Amazon announcement .

You must have been comparing to something else entirely! The cheapest Ultrascale part that Digi-Key carries is XCVU065 at $6800, and that isn't even in the right part family.

Might have been confused by the part number; I think the Kintex series is closer to the $2k range, so that might be the confusing culprit.

Pricing is incorrect.

Here's how it looks[1], with further links to the product down the comment chain. The picture I posted there has the exact product's picture with the correct specs. I don't remember the exact pricing but I think it was about $9k

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13074537

Yeah, I too was mystified that they didn't bother to mention this on the landing page, or even explain what it is for newbies who are unfamiliar with FPGAs.

If you don't know what an FPGA is, you are probably not going to be able to do much with one. It's kind of like expecting the Ubuntu homepage to explain what Linux is, or the Django website to explain what Python is.

I agree with you. It's a complex topic that takes a long time to learn and use effectively. It costs plenty of money. We don't need a site on development kits aimed at practitioners to explain the basics of what they are. We have other sites for that.

> It costs plenty of money.

Not for the entry level. The Icestorm [1] tools are free software, in every sense of the word, and can take you all the way from Verilog source (or VHDL using GHDL's analyser [2]) to a bitstream. An associated board, such as an iCEstick or iCE40-HX8K, costs $40 downwards. (Cheap enough that a friendly sales rep. gave me one for free on request.)

[1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

[2] https://github.com/tgingold/ghdlsynth-beta

The project is about AWS's using high-end FPGA's. It's going to assume they have money and already learned the stuff since they pay as they go. Whereas, for a page on introducing FPGA's, what you referenced would be good stuff to have on it. Especially in addition to Spartan boards or list of cheap kits.

Again, this isn't an introduction.

Just wanted to make it clear to the casual reader, who was considering learning about FPGAs, that "plenty of money" doesn't have to be the case. It would be a pity if we lost a newbie :-)

$150 should get you a half decent board with all kinds of interesting IO options and a free toolchain.

And if that's too much, there are boards like this: https://www.amazon.com/RioRand-EP2C5T144-Altera-Cyclone-Deve...

Together with a $10 USB dongle, you can get going for $35.

It's still big enough to store small CPUs etc. A lot of fun!

Now now, don't be talking about how things are fun and might appeal to newbies or children. Gatekeeping is Serious Business and is not a fit subject for play or enjoyment.

The iCEstick is probably quite useful for general-purpose hardware interfacing tasks, etc but I doubt you'll be doing much in the way of FPGA compute on one of those.

Yes, but that's not very helpful to people who are just becoming aware of such technology. There is some room between explaining things in elementary terms like a tutorial and being cryptic to the point of hostility (see: lots of Unix man pages).

The #1 question I find myself asking on tech-related landing pages is 'why might I be interested in learning about this?' because people so often write documentation aimed purely at their own level of knowledge, to the point that they sometimes forget that it might be of interest to anyone else, or even to mention What It's Good For.

It's not a whole lot of extra effort to say 'FPGAs get us closer to the performance of dedicated hardware while maintaining much of the flexibility of software. If you have ever enjoyed building electronic circuits then you may love programming FPGAs.'

It's kind of like expecting the Ubuntu homepage to explain what Linux is

And why would it be such a bad thing for it to say something like 'Linux is a wonderful operating system for your that anyone can use or modify for their own purposes, and it's free!' In fact, it does say something along those lines:

Ubuntu is an open source software platform that runs from the cloud, to the smartphone, to all your things.

Is there something bad about being informative and accessible?

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