Comment by 15155 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 15155 | Hacker News Reader

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Do you need UltraScale(+)? The Tang Mega 138k has way fewer LUTs than most US+ chips, it's a completely different class of FPGA.

You can purchase a SQRL FK33 (VU33P on PCIE cards) for $250 used in the Dream escrow Discord. Here's one on eBay for $400 (a little steep) - this is the cheapest you will get into UltraScale+: https://www.ebay.com/itm/387229340513 This is also the cheapest way to obtain 8GB of HBM, which you will want for a GPU eventually.

For $1000ish, you can get a C1100 (VU35P, 2x the area of VU33P, 8GB HBM) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/186414684753 - these do not require a Vivado license.

For $600-1300 you can get VCU1525 (VU9P - no HBM) boards used: https://www.ebay.com/itm/326206486963

For new stuff, you could get 7 Series Kintex devboards from China: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805175295035.html

I definitely do not need a very large FPGA, though navigating this space as a newbie is quite hard -- I've built some small projects (serial multiplexer and a WASM CPU) on the Tang Nano 9k/20k

I think the difference between a $220 board and a $1000~ board is quite large for a hobby project

> I definitely do not need a very large FPGA

Bigger is better here - even if you don't use the LUTs/FFs, the tools have a much easier time placing/routing a relatively small design into a huge chip.

If your budget is $220ish, I would buy a used FK33 without a doubt for $250. You can use the Vivado trial (and keep renewing it.)

https://discord.gg/MynAgXK is Dream Escrow - lots of good/safe listings in there.

439680 LUTs, 879360 FFs, 672 BRAM, 2880 DSP, 320 URAM, 8GB HBM is plenty to work with.

The FK33 also has an FTDI chip onboard for convenient JTAG flashing, comms, and management.

> though navigating this space as a newbie is quite hard

This space is all about the tools: Xilinx is head and shoulders above everyone else. Quartus might be second, Lattice's tools are absolutely terrible (but open-source workflows exist for some of their chips.)

If you're designing PCIe devices and not wanting to build the PCIe IP, Xilinx's is absolutely the best in that department as well. There are more PCIe examples and boards for Xilinx chips than probably every other manufacturer.

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