Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zoltanlehoczky 2389 days ago
And regarding Nexys: now we actually support Microsoft Catapult FPGAs as well and working on others too. It's quite challenging to add support for each of them, since as I'm sure you're aware, HLD is nowhere near as portable, especially between manufacturers, than software. Also, while if you know an HDL like VHDL then you can write code for all FPGAs, but keep in mind that you also have to write code compatible with each FPGA specifically (with major differences being at least between product families). With a high-level approach like Hastlayer, you get multi-FPGA support for free, i.e. your code won't change. It narrows your options hardware-wise but it's much simpler. It's a question of trade-offs and depends on what is most suitable for you.

Regarding size limitations: check out the samples on what you can fit on a low-end FPGA with Hastlayer, it's not that small. FPGAs that are more suitable as actual compute accelerators have 5-10x the logic resources (and much more) than the Nexys in question.