Kirk Wallace wrote: >Has or can Pluto's cousin, the Dragon PCI FPGA board be used with EMC? > >Kirk Wallace > > Hmmm.
I think If I were going to get a PCI FPGA card, I'd go with a Mesa. There are several reasons, not least of which is that the Mesa cards have a separate PCI bus interface chip, so you don't have to tie up FPGA gates with the PCI interface (and you're less likely to hard-lock your PC if you screw up an FPGA config - it is possible if you mess with PCI signals directly) Second, the Mesa cards are designed to be used in an embedded / industrial environment. The pluto certainly doesn't look that way, so I'm not sure about the dragon. Third is cost/value. The Mesa 5i20 is $199, and it has a 200k-gate FPGA (instead of 100k on the dragon for $299). If you want to go a little higher in price, then for $369 you can get the 5i22-1, a 1 million gate Spartan-3 (or up to $429 for the 1.5M gate version). I don't have any personal experience with the Pluto or Dragon, so I'm not trying to bash them here. I do have experiece with the Mesa cards, and given that you get twice the gates for 2/3 the price, plus you get the external PCI interface, I'd say there aren't many reasons to go with the Dragon. Of course, there is one :) The Dragon doesn't have to be used inside a PC, and/or it can automatically load its program from EEPROM at power-up. The Mesa cards have to be rerpogrammed via software, so the FPGA won't be configured for the minute or two that the PC is booting up. - Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
