[13of40]

Something I've often dreamed about is an fpga board in pcie card form with a sane toolset along side it so I can treat it as software instead of getting advanced degrees in desktop cable management and I/O pin mapping. Does something like that exist?

[slivym]

What you're describing is OpenCL, yes it exists, both Xilinx and Intel produce toolsets. No they aren't sane by software standards, but they're fantastic compared to hardware engineering. A card will cost you ~$10k for something you'd actually get acceleration from (https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo/u250.h...) and you'll still need a degree in electronic engineering to produce something that convincingly accelerates your task.

[imtringued]

Most FPGAs that are viable accellerators aren't for hobbyists but they also are not as expensive as you think. I can't find it anymore but I once saw an online shop with a huge variety of 500k+ LUT FPGA modules (just the chip itself on a small PCB) for around 1000€ + 500€ breakoutboard/mainboard. At those prices it makes more sense as an individual to invest into more CPU cores or a GPU (if your problem maps to it).

Edit: Maybe its this one here. https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/de/TE0808-04-06EG-1EE-Ultra...

[gudok]

How much time would it take to synthesize 500K-lut design on a high-end workstation?

[nraynaud]

wait, we have an FPGA-based hardware module to accelerate synthetization!

(or even more ironic: an ASIC module)

[TomVDB]

Around 5 hours.

[guiriduro]

If you run Linux and are happy with 4 64-bit ARM cores, 154K logic elements and 2GB LDDR4, $250 is the new low bar for low-cost acceleration[1]. [1] https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/1-vad4rl.htm...

[tremon]

Adding to my siblings, Lattice Semiconductor also has a line of FPGA boards with PCI-E connectors: http://www.latticesemi.com/pci-express

I caution you to not dismiss the entire field of computer hardware engineering as "cable management". If that's your view, best just stick to whatever you're doing now.

[metaphor]

Depending on how you define "sane toolset", they do exist[1]...except they're in that class where if have to ask the price you probably can't afford it, and it doesn't relieve a developer of vendor place-and-route toolchain to build the application pipeline.

[1] https://www.nallatech.com/solutions/all-fpga-cards/