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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

I guess the interesting question is how this approach compares to FPGAs in terms of cost and performance. Given the functionality of the different chiplets as soft IP, wiring them together and loading the design into an FPGA should be easy enough. So how much more would I have to spend on FPGAs to implement the same functionality as a typical combination of chiplets? How much more to match the performance? Or are there no FPGAs that could fit the functionality or match the performance?

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Depending on who you ask, the silicon area overhead of programmable logic FPGA is 25X-100X compared to hard coded logic of an ASIC (at the same node). Very few applications can afford the cost of full platform programmability with large devices costing over $5K.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amd/XCVM1802-1MSE...

Does this transalte to if I have a design that I can fit into a $10k FPGA and that can also be implemented with Zero ASIC's chiplets, then I will be able to get a chip in the $100 to $400 range?

No my bad for not being clear. If all you want is a bunch of LUTs then the high end fpga is the right answer. FPGA today is a lot of other things besides PL (serdes, cpu, DSP, ML, DDR IF...) and some of those features are only available on the bigger FPGAs. FPGA portfolios have man gaps due to the enormous costs of designing each one of those FPGA products.

A $10k FPGA at Digikey price or a $10k FPGA at the direct from [vendor] purchase price? The former is a medium sized chip, and the latter is a huge one. If you have a volume product, you actually get reasonable pricing from the FPGA vendors.

I would guess if you are considering a semi-ASIC solution like Zero ASIC, then you probably want to build more than a handful of devices, so getting the FPGAs from the vendor would probably be the better comparison. What kind of price difference are we talking about here? The most expensive FPGA I could quickly find on DigiKey is a AMD Virtex UltraScale+ VU57P for $174k in quantity one, what could I realistically expect to pay if I ever needed a thousand of them? Half the price? One tenth?

The price difference for direct, volume purchases of FPGAs is reportedly about 10-50x lower than the unit price on Digikey, but they keep it very secret so they can price gouge you on negotiations. That VU57P likely costs at most $10-15k when purchased directly and in volume.

As a comparison, this fully-built PCIe card with a VU13P FPGA costs $13k at quantity 1: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/BittWare/XUPVV8-0007?qs...

While a single unit of a comparable chip to the one on that card costs $77k on digikey: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/amd/XCVU13P-2FHGC...

VU13s (2104D) can be had from Xilinx for <$1000. New VU35Ps were $700 in modest quantities a year or two ago.

The Bittware CVP-13/XUPVVP product was $5100 new.

Used VU13Ps run $300 in China.

These Versal chips are around $1500 used in Shenzhen and I am buying $300 VU35P/VU13Ps all day long.

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