Why can I not purchase a PCI board with a Spartan3, some SRAM, and a DRAM slot for $200? That's way more than the cost of the parts. Heck, with Xilinx's recent anouncements about 3rd party PCI-Express support I should be able to get that interface for the same price. What I'm picturing is general coprocessing. Nobody seems to think FPGAs are valuable for everyday coprocessing if you judge by the boards being made. Cray, Starbridge, SGI, Nallatech, and others recognize the value in coprocessing but they are targeting the HPCS market. It's the wrong market. All the other PCI boards I've seen lately are made for prototyping or DSP processing, especially in the sub $5k range. A simple Spartan3-based board for coprocessing could change the world. Video game companies could ship neural net modules, math companies could ship libraries that use it for acceleration, CAD and imaging companies could take advantage of it for acceleration, etc; for that to happen, everybody needs one. For that to happen, they have to be as cheap as a decent graphics card and compilers for them must be as cheap as GNU gcc. And they don't need a freakin' serial port, ethernet port, parallel port, USB port, half a dozen different RAM ports, proprietary connectors, and the kitchen sink for prototyping! How are we going to get there and why are we not there already?
- posted
18 years ago