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Comment by transpute | Hacker News Reader

Could a future variant of this motherboard include Xilinx or Lattice FPGAs? That would enable new board functions based on LiteX OSS FPGA toolchain.

Similar to the AMD/Xilinx Zynq family of boards ($150 to $3K), https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/device-famil...

Or Bunnie Huang's Precursor dev kit for RISC-V with handheld kb/display ($600), https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

> Precursor draws less power than most other FPGAs thanks to the "-1L" variant Xilinx Spartan 7-Series at its heart. (The "L" stands for "low leakage.") That efficiency — combined with a super-low-power Lattice iCE40 UP5K FPGA for deep-sleep system management and a Silicon Labs WF200 with integrated network co-processor for Wi-Fi connectivity — allows Precursor to achieve a standby time measured in days and an active screen time of about five to six hours.

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Don't count on it. FPGAs are stupidly expensive, and those vendor-provided devboards are often sold below market price. Anything worth your time is stuck behind a proprietary toolchain. Besides, there just isn't all that much you can realistically do with it. FPGAs shine at realtime processing of huge volumes of data, but you lack the necessary IO in a mobile form factor to do anything meaningful you couldn't already do with a CPU or GPU.

The Precursor is a neat device, but in the end it's essentially a toy. The entire concept hinges on emulating a SoC with the FPGA, but a real SoC can offer an order of magnitude more performance at a tenth the price. It only makes sense if your risk model is a chip vendor putting backdoors in the SoC - but at that point why would you trust the FPGA? It's just moving the goalposts, really.

> why would you trust the FPGA?

AMD/Xilinx will use US-mainland TSMC fab for some FPGAs.

> you lack the necessary IO in a mobile form factor

Framework has pluggable I/O expansion modules.

You can also get SoCs which are manufactured in the US or Europe.

Framework's IO modules are just USB-C. That's not really flexible or fast enough to really make a high-speed FPGA shine.

The reason you would trust and FPGA more than a SoC is because putting in backdoors in an FPGA is much harder. If an FPGA is backdoored to the point where any soft core (whose layout kind be randomized to some degree) is compromised, then that would likely be obvious from the kind of inspections Bunnie has written about: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2023/infra-red-in-situ-ir...

Why is it a toy just because it has an order of magnitude less performance? Computers became powerful enough for most people decades ago. I get much more utility out of a computer that grows capability in other aspects like mobility and power consumption.

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