[RossBencina]

> Xilinx UltraScale+ VU9P fabricated using a 16 nm process.

> 64 GiB of ECC-protected memory on a 288-bit wide bus (four DDR4 channels).

> Dedicated PCIe x16 interface to the CPU.

Does anyone know whether this is likely to be a plug-in card? and can I buy one to plug in to a local machine for testing?

[jasonwatkinspdx]

https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/device-famil...

[smilekzs]

Even if it does, this can easily sell for $10k+.

[duskwuff]

Much more. The FPGA alone will push the parts cost to ~$30K-55K+.

[errordeveloper]

Yeah, the point is that you should need to buy any hardware even for development, which is the biggest win to me!

[aseipp]

But having the hardware is vital. You have to test your design a lot. You're still going to need Vivado (which isn't cheap) and you'll need instance time to test the design on the real hardware with real workloads, along with any syntheiszable test benches you want to run on the hardware.

The pricing structure of the development AMI is going to be meaningful here, because it clearly includes some kind of Vivado license. It might not be as cheap as you expect, and you need to spend a lot of time with the synthesis tool to learn. The F1 machines themselves are certainly not going to be cheap at all.

If you want to learn FPGA development, you can get a board for less than $50 USD one-time cost and a fully open source toolchain for it -- check my sibling comments in this thread. Hell, if you really want, you can get a mid-range Xilinx Artix FPGA with a Vivado Design Edition voucher, and a board supporting all the features, for like $160, which is closer to what AWS is offering, and will still probably be quite cheap as a flat cost, if you're serious about learning what the tools can offer: http://store.digilentinc.com/basys-3-artix-7-fpga-trainer-bo... -- it supports almost all of the same basic device/Vivado features as the Virtex UltraScale, so "upgrading" to the Real Deal should be fine, once you're comfortable with the tools.

[user5994461]

I expect a Vivado license with all my development cards.

P.S. The few orders I had were SoC Zynq boards in the $400-1000 range.