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Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

2x more resources compared to $30 https://github.com/q3k/chubby75 at 5x the price

The Hub75 boards are great, but aren't really comparable to the ulx3s as they have extremely limited I/O options (a whole ton of output-only TTL level shifters, + 2 gigabit interfaces). Great if your project fits into those constraints, but few projects do. Plus they are only available with 25F size parts whereas the ulx3s is available with a 85F part.

What is your pick for the best FPGA for the money or if money is no object? I just don’t know much about this area outside the MiSTer project.

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki

https://www.retrorgb.com/mister.html

Intel Stratix 10

Can you say more about why this one is the one? Is it better in quantitative ways or ease of use than competitors? Cheaper or more reliable? Etc

Stratix 10 is an absolutely enormous FPGA (10FLOPS) so I'm guessing wow-factor rather than ease of use.

Oh wow, I had no idea they were that advanced. How much do these go for secondhand?

There is no sensible secondhand market for things like this; it will be embedded in someone's board. And there aren't many about to start with.

Sometimes people are lucky enough to find decent FPGAs in scrap, but it's like panning for gold.

I've recently bought second-hand Xilinx FPGAs on Ebay for $250 each with list price of $3500. They come on boards that have an unidentified manufacturing fault. Salvaging and reusing the chips seems realistic using a budget vapor phase soldering setup (not attempted yet) but the challenge for me is designing or otherwise acquiring suitable PCBs to put them onto. I'm told that you can potentially find suitable PCBs on Aliexpress but I haven't looked into this in detail yet.

In other words, there doesn't seem to be much demand in the secondhand market, and you can potentially use that in your favor to take advantage of supply selling at steep discounts.

(De)soldering FPGAs is also very intricate, very high number of pins, high pin density make for a high error rate and low to no chance of simple rework. Also, the need for boards with a lot of layers to get that high pin count and density out from under the chip.

It is easier, faster and cheaper to start from one of the available devel boards and maybe even use them as production components for small batches

I handle most of pull requests and issue tracking on the chubby75 project: it's a great FPGA board for experimenting, but only if you need to drive a lot of IOs and don't have any GPIO input requirements.

A replacement for the general purpose ULX3S it is not.

Is this because people using it cant solder and replacing SOP24 package with 8 jumpers is a show stopper?

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