[HH] free access to Amazon hosted FPGAs in the cloud

[Greg London]

On Thu, May 4, 2017 9:39 am, Kurt Keville wrote:
> This sounds interesting... I wonder if their boards have enough
> reconfigurable logic for RISC-V designs?

The Xilinx ZYNQ chip has a hard macro ARM cortex 9 running at
800 mhz or higher. Most fpga designs end up synthesizing to
a much, much lower frequency, like maybe 100mhz.

The rule of thumb from Xilinx was that you need about 10 pipelines
of data in an algorithm before it becomes worth running in
the FPGA versus running in the processor.

With intel processors running in multi gigahertz ranges,
that might be 40 or 50 pipes deep before its better to
run on an FPGA.



> On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 10:13 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+hhacking at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> I think that is saying free developer access...so interesting
>> opportunity if one wanted to learn VHDL.

Why would you curse someone with the pain and suffering of VHDL?

Does Amazon's service come with High Level Synthesis tools?
You could write your algorithm in c and then run it as software
and run it in an fpga and do a side by side comparison to see
which is faster.