I cannot think of any reason to run windows for synthesis these days. Xilinx works quite well on amd64-linux, so why not just invest in a nice case and an AMD FM2/FM3 (cpu + GPU) motherboard, and something like 32GB of RAM?
I'll also question the need for a 'big' FPGA. I've *almost* managed to fit the Milkymist-NG into an Spartan6-LX25, and this has a cpu + video processing (the regular milkymist platform has an LX45 IIRC) I think you could do a LOT with just putting 4-16 shaders on this: http://www.xess.com/prods/prod055.php The benefit of 'small' FPGAs is you will make things accessible to a HUGE number of hobbyists, open-source hardware hackers, and students. I would think the results from 4, 8, 16 shaders would scale in a pretty straightforward way to thousands of shaders without having to spend megabucks on a big FPGA board that only one person can really use at once. If you want big, I think you can scale much faster and farther with LX75T FPGAs, the https://bitbucket.org/dahozer/infiniband-fpga code, and an Infiniband switch. (but that requires some infrastructure work to finish that code and make it work on current MGT implementations) On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 07:48:24PM -0400, Timothy Normand Miller wrote: > Possibly in the summer, I'm going to invest in some really big FPGA to help > with this GPU work. Give or take, I'm looking to spend about USD 10000 to > 15000 for the FPGA board and an "adequate" Linux PC to plug it into as a > host (assuming the FPGA board has PCIe). I might need to also splurge for > a Windows PC to run the FPGA synthesis tools. > > Note: I'd benefit from a reasonably fast Windows PC for synthesis, but > otherwise, I don't need to spend a lot on fast CPUs, which is why the Linux > host can be fairly low-end. I have access to more than enough fast compute > power from existing facilities. > > Any suggestions? > > BTW, if we're comparing Virtex to Spartan, I need lots of SRAMs and > multipliers, but I don't yet know the relative proportion of random logic. > IIRC, Virtex has more random logic, while Spartan has more RAMs and DSP > blocks. So if we can narrow down the choices a bit, then I can pick the > right one after I have enough logic to synthesize something. > > Right now, I have tentatively 5 masters students wanting to work on > OpenShader over the summer. > > > -- > Timothy Normand Miller, PhD > Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Binghamton University > http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~millerti/ > Open Graphics Project > _______________________________________________ > Open-graphics mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics > List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com) _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
