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Comment by aseipp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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