it looks like xilinx may have laid the golden goose - can i ask people here to help evaluate this:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/epp/zynq-7000/index.htm that's an incredible combination of a state-of-the-art FPGA, about the same capabilities of a Spartan 3 4000, with an on-board 800mhz Dual-Core Cortex A9. the existing interfaces include some quite basic ones that should be expected - USB2, I2C, CAN-bus, RS232 and so on, but then also include 2 Gigabit Ethernet and, in the case of the 7030 and 7040, multi-lanes of PCI-e (between 4 for the smaller versions at 468 pins, and 12 for the absolute largest 900-pin monster) now, the possibilities for this kind of combination are very, very exciting. 1) as there are no proprietary hard macro cells such as 3D Graphics or MPEG engines, the CPU will undoubtedly be FSF Hardware-Endorsement Compliant. 2) (someone please check!) i believe that the capabilities of the 7030 version should be sufficient to take over from the Spartan 3 4000, meaning that it could, in combination with the NEON instruction set, actually be the next OGP hardware IC 3) with some care on the design, i believe it may be possible to create a module which is, itself, a stand-alone computer yet that exact same module could also plug into an OGP PCI-e card. so, the irony is that if you ever got fed up with the amount of power that the desktop computer into which an OGP module using the Zynq-7000 was plugged, you could take that module out and use the module *as* the desktop computer :) i'll do up some block diagrams and post them later, but i wanted to ask: would something like this be of interest to anyone (hybrid multi-purpose module)? and, if so, what would you be prepared to pay, to make sure it happened? let's assume it comes with 1gb of DDR3 ECC RAM. l. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
