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Comment by ramchip | Hacker News Reader

The title doesn't mean much if you don't specify at what. It's only about floating point, and the comparison is with a purely theoretical CPU.

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Also, two of article's four authors work for Xilinx, which makes the FPGA in question.

Does anyone know how much these things cost? A quick google yielded nothing, but I may using the wrong terms.

I found one board, EK-V7-VC707-CES-G, for USD3.5k

The only time I was ever "in the market" for a board was in 2007, and back then it was a struggle getting parts; this was in the days of FX/LX/SX availability, and I wanted an SX part (with many DSP units) but basically got told no unless I wanted to buy over 50 units. So, had to settle for the bog standard FX. Paid USD5k for it (a premium for Infiniband connectivity).

Check farnell.com. They don't seem to stock the Virtex-7 family yet, but the price-range of the Virtex-6 family might provide some guidance (£350-£850).

Edit: This is for the naked chip, not a board. There's quite a discrepancy with int19h's findings, I don't know if that can be all up to the board?

Boards for high-end FPGAs like that are not cheap to make yourself either (needs like 6 layers or more, because they have SO MANY densely packed pins + you need one or two layers to feed its gratuitous hunger for power), so you'll probably end up having to buy some ready-to-use solution that probably quadruples that price...

I do not think they crippled that theoretical CPU, though:

  "The floating point performance for the reference microprocessor
   is calculated by multiplying the number of floating point
   functions units on each core by the number of cores and by the
   clock frequency.
   ...
   this article series has been using a normalized value of 2.5 GHz
   clock frequency."

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