You are right the ARM cores, mostly. Xilinx Zynq devices have ARM A devices built into them as "hard" cores. That is, the ARMs are instantiated directly in silicon, not as "soft" cores which take LUTs (gates) from the FPGA fabric. The ARM A is a microprocessor (not a microcontroller) powerful enough to run Linux.
The ARM connects to the FPGA fabric using a so-called AXI bus, which is a local bus defined by ARM. Xilinx supplies a bunch of "soft" cores which you can instantiate in the FPGA and integrate with the ARM. Of course, you can write your own logic for the FPGA too, as long as you can figure out how to interface to it using one of the AXI bus variants.
Several vendors offer experimenters platforms which are affordable enough for hobbyists and folks making engineering prototypes. Examples are the Avnet's Zed board and Digilent's Zybo board.
The biggest problem with the Zynq ecosystem is that the Xilinx tools -- Vivado/SDK and whatever they renamed it to last year -- are steaming piles of smelly brown stoff. Vivado is buggy, poorly supported, has bad documentation, and the supplied examples typically don't work in the latest version of Vivado since they were written long ago and have been made obsolete via version skew. An absolute disgrace compared to what software engineers are used to. The SDK is basically Eclipse which has its own problems, but is not as bad as Vivado. Ask me how I know.
I think AMD and Xilinx have a long way to go before they can satisfy the hype and speculation I see in all the posts here. I suppose one could shell out $20K for a seat of Synopsys if one wanted a decent set of dev tools, but that's not the direction most software engineers are going nowadays.
Also, assuming NVidia completes its acquisition of ARM, the whole Zynq ecosystem is imperiled since it pits ARM against NVidia.
Not sure how realistic it would be, but I would like to see a RISC-V base core, and the FPGA implementing the extensions. Why? Because it would be cool! Also, I don't really see a use case except for debugging compilers supporting multiple RISC-V extensions and what not.
The ARM connects to the FPGA fabric using a so-called AXI bus, which is a local bus defined by ARM. Xilinx supplies a bunch of "soft" cores which you can instantiate in the FPGA and integrate with the ARM. Of course, you can write your own logic for the FPGA too, as long as you can figure out how to interface to it using one of the AXI bus variants.
Several vendors offer experimenters platforms which are affordable enough for hobbyists and folks making engineering prototypes. Examples are the Avnet's Zed board and Digilent's Zybo board.
The biggest problem with the Zynq ecosystem is that the Xilinx tools -- Vivado/SDK and whatever they renamed it to last year -- are steaming piles of smelly brown stoff. Vivado is buggy, poorly supported, has bad documentation, and the supplied examples typically don't work in the latest version of Vivado since they were written long ago and have been made obsolete via version skew. An absolute disgrace compared to what software engineers are used to. The SDK is basically Eclipse which has its own problems, but is not as bad as Vivado. Ask me how I know.
I think AMD and Xilinx have a long way to go before they can satisfy the hype and speculation I see in all the posts here. I suppose one could shell out $20K for a seat of Synopsys if one wanted a decent set of dev tools, but that's not the direction most software engineers are going nowadays.
Also, assuming NVidia completes its acquisition of ARM, the whole Zynq ecosystem is imperiled since it pits ARM against NVidia.