Le 2012-12-09 03:44, Troy Benjegerdes a écrit :
One missing interface is to video/display. There are embedded SERDES
but they don't seem rated for HDMI (it's a speed issue, I've been
told,
HDMI is slower than their SERDES... but they should look into it).
How much are the devkits?
no devkit yet, the product is being announced for "early 2013"
and knowing the company, it's not an "advance announcement",
they have "engineering samples" and are ramping up certain references.
So I expect devkits (whatever features...) in mid-2013. This summer
will be hot.
Can an Actel do 1x PCI-E gen1,
From what I understand, yes :
"* SEU Protected Memories: eSRAMs, DDR Bridges (MSS, MDDR, FDDR),
Instruction Cache, Ethernet, CAN and USB Buffers, PCIe, MMUARTand
SPI FIFOs"
or usb2/3?
Check yourself at http://www.actel.com/products/SmartFusion2/
the SF2 chips support USB though they require an external PHY.
(the other interface of note might be thunderbolt..
http://blogs.synopsys.com/tousbornottousb/2012/03/30/ti-supports-thunderbolt-thunderbolt-pricing/
)
hmmmm tb is still pretty marginal.
I'm thinking this looks like it would work pretty good for
an openshader devkit too...
Since Microsemi's SF2 targets "average" performance (from 2012's
perspective)
at very low power consumption, I believe that it is great for
developing openshader, and even integrating in industrial systems.
From there, more "consumer" versions can be derived.
http://devbisme.webfactional.com/blogs/devbisme/2011/06/02/simple-vga-interface-xula-fpga-board
other FPGA boards have used this system for VGA output but they work
only for lower resolutions and pixel clocks. I have some tens of
Brooktree
chips in stock for better bit depths in PLCC but the clock might not
get
to 1280*1024, i'll have to check.
I'm still stuck with the crappyness of the FPGA dev toolchains.
The Xilinx ISE I'm trying to get installed to make bitstreams
for my xula2 is multi-gigabytes.
one reason why i stick to Actel/microsemi is that their
(up to rev. 9) Libero is not overly excessively bloated.
This seems to evolve with the new SF2 chips because
the logic gates have changed (for better performance and density)
but hopefully not to the intolerable levels of X&A.
Going back to xess.com, for:
$14.95 (stickit motherboard)
$14.95 (stickit vga module)
$119 (xula2 XC6SLX25)
---
~$150 total, you get a usb-connected module that can do VGA.
that's the price range of usual Actel discovery kits,
they try to get to $99 but add taxes, customs and shipping and whatnot
and it's already doubled for us youropians...
Of course, full-featured kits with all the nice interfaces
(video, 10Gbps interfaces etc.) will cost more.
But having a scalable programmable shader and blitter in the SF2
will bring it to new awesomeness levels.
So what are we waiting for ? :-D
YG
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