
New Xilinx Virtex-7 2000T FPGA provides equivalent of 20 million ASIC gates - rbanffy
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/fpga-pld-products/4230049/New-Xilinx-Virtex-7-2000T-FPGA-provides-equivalent-of-20-million-ASIC-gates
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tryp
Bear in mind that a the current generation of these, the Virtex 6, starts at
about $800 for the smallest parts and I believe goes well over $20k for the
larger ones. Expect the Virtex 7 to be priced in this ballpark.

edit: I was off by an order of magnitude on the high end. $2k -> $20k

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ajross
It's a monster chip. I don't see a die area number, but at 6.8G transistors
that would place it at about twice the size of the biggest Geforce dies. So
yields are going to be lower due to simple scaling constraints (though FPGAs
no doubt have lots of redundancy by their nature, so some failures probably
don't kill the chip). And it's 28nm, which is a brand new process and won't
yield as well. _AND_ big FPGAs are a low volume market.

So yes, I wouldn't expect these to be cheap. They're not consumer SoC parts.

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jlp3
You're quite right, a traditional die with 6.8 billion transistors on it would
likely have serious yield issues. This is why Xilinx is using the silicon
interposer to combine multiple die into a single package. So it's not actually
1 6.8b transistor die but 4 roughly 1.7b transistor die. Still huge, but in
line with the level of integration that others (Intel, IBM) are using.

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rbanffy
I wonder if that's enough to build a pocket Alto or Lisp Machine...

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vidarh
It'd be shocking if it wasn't, given that there's a number of FPGA based
implementations of more recent and far more complex machines (in terms of gate
count at least) than the Alto and early generation lisp machines, such as
various incarnations of Commodore Amigas.

Some of them use external CPUs, but newer generation ones such as the FPGA
Arcade can hold pretty much the entire machine include the CPU in the FPGA
(usual exception is RAM, and a micro controller to bootstrap).

See FPGA Arcade, Natami, Minimig, C-One, Chameleon and others. Natami is the
most capable of the bunch (aiming to be a faster, better Amiga), while
Chameleon is probably the smallest (the size of an old style Commodore 64
cartridge, and can plug into a real Commodore 64, since it started as a C64
expansion on steroids, but it can run standalone too), with FPGA Arcade a nice
middle group (fits in Mini-ITX form factor boxes, but isn't deep enough to
fill nearly all of the box).

FPGA Arcade: <http://www.fpgaarcade.com/> Chameleon:
<http://www.vesalia.de/e_chameleon.htm>

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Florin_Andrei
So, what would be a good FPGA starter kit, just to learn how these things
work?

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reemrevnivek
To learn how FPGAs work, I'd recommend starting with a cheap Digilent board;
see <http://www.digilentinc.com/choosing.cfm> \- You can get a simple BASYS 2
board for under $100, possibly under $50. This board is the Arduino of the
FPGA world. There are tutorials from many schools, lots of good documentation,
it's a proven design...you can't go wrong with the Basys board. It does
sacrifice performance for simplicity, though - Notably, there's no RAM except
for what's on the FPGA. Go up to the Nexys for that, but if you're just
interested in learning Verilog/VHDL, the Basys is a fine place to start.

To learn how _these things_ work, get a job at a company which uses FPGAs.
You'll probably never see one of these parts as a hobbyist.

If you're interested in stuff that's actually like this, and want to start
right away, then look for a board packaged as a PCIe card. This will be
significantly more expensive; think $500 on the extreme low end. NetFPGA is
(<http://netfpga.org/>) is a good starting point if you're trying to start at
a higher level. (Note that the old board is 33MHz PCI and the processor is
obsolete; you want the 4x10GBE Virtex 5 part if you're looking for modern
tools)

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pnathan
+1 for Digilent. They are a local company for me; they do really great
hardware stuff at an affordable price.

The founder of the company is a pretty spiffy speaker as well; if you have a
chance to see him, it's worth it.

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zokier
As a comparison, Pentium 3 had 10 million transistors. Does that mean that in
theory you could implement P3 CPU on this FPGA?

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luu
You could do a lot more than that, as there are multiple transistors for each
gate (assuming static CMOS).

My company uses FPGAs to for verification during development (because it takes
months to get silicon back after tapeout, and it costs millions of dollars
even if you only want one single test chip). We make chips that are much more
complex than a P3. Friends of mine at other microprocessor companies have told
me that they have a similar process, though some of them at larger companies
use their own custom hardware for accelerated simulation, since you can't fit
anything like a POWER7 or even a core i3 on a commercially available FPGA.

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rbanffy
I don't know if that would be practical, but both Intel and IBM can build
wafer-sized FPGAs if they really need to.

The standard wafer they use is around 30 cm, right?

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ableal
There are some neat cross-sections of the 28 nm process here:
[http://www.electroiq.com/blogs/chipworks_real_chips_blog/201...](http://www.electroiq.com/blogs/chipworks_real_chips_blog/2011/07/tsmc-
hkmg-is-out-there.html)

