But will it play...
ahh... never mind,
If you've ever wanted to embed cheap-and-cheerful Arm Cortex CPU cores into your Xilinx FPGA designs, well, now's your chance. The processor designer is making its 32-bit microcontroller-grade Cortex-M1 and M3 cores available for Xilinx's Spartan, Artix, and Zynq chips via its DesignStart program. We're told there are no …
They're only giving them away free for the Xilinx stuff - that would be at levels where the accountancy/licensing cost probably exceed the revenue. But if they can help you get started then when you go custom they get a share of that.
I wonder if you can get 8 Arm cores and highways on a Artix7 gate array for less than a production equivalent though?
FPGAs are always slower and more expensive than the equivalent design in an ASIC. It’s just the nature of the beast (it needs to be larger than an ASIC as there’s lots of general purpose stuff in there that may or may not be used, and the distance between functional blocks is larger so signal propagation is slower). This includes putting CPUs in soft format on an FPGA.
If it is too expensive to create an ASIC, or the design is subject to change, and the task at hand is well suited to parallel execution in hardware, then this is the use case for an FPGA.
Both Altera/Intel and Xilinx are producing FPGAs with hard ARM CPUs these days (Cyclone V SE models from Altera and ZINQ models from Xilinx). These ARM cores can run much faster than soft cores while being easy to connect to the FPGA logic (AXI or AMBA protocols for example).
Intel are starting to add FPGA bocks to Xeon processors so that custom hardware acceleration can be added to traditional sequential programs.
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ASIC is only cheaper in very high volume. A niche design may not be economic. Speed is less of an issue than power. The ASIC will always be lower power. Often exactly the same speed, as the FPGA is the prototype of the ASIC.
The FPGA tools produce the files needed to make the ASIC. It's a question of volume, size and power consumption if the ASIC is produced.
"many's the project that came a cropper thinking that transitioning an FPGA to full ASIC was just a question of, "generating some files."
Undoubtedly true.
Now, is that a reason for going FPGA, going ASIC, or is it a reason for **understanding the available options and choosing the right tool for the job**, like IT people do. IT people always choose the right tool for the job, don't they.
>Excuse my ignorance, but what can this be used for in the real world?
See my post about servo drive coprocessors. FPGAs are actually really useful for small and medium volume industrial equipment, anything that needs an intelligent subsystem that might have custom peripherals. FPGAs themselves replace most discrete logic; these parts are extremely capable; typically their main design limitation is that you run out of input / output pins.
You can actually run Linux on a FPGA based processor but you don't usually do this because its not an efficient use of logic resources, if you want an actual computer rather than an embeddable processor then you're better off using a processor subsystem SoC like the device used in a Raspberry Pi.
Xilinx have a soft processor for their FPGA lines, its been around for decades. Its a fairly generic RISC they call "Microblaze". Along with the processor they supply a lot of different peripherals so its possible to build quite a complex system on a FPGA. For example, we use them as communications coprocessors for servo drives -- you can pack a processor, UART(s), network interface (which could be the rather complex Ethercat interface), CAN peripheral, and various bits of RAM (dual port and standard) and still have room for things like encoder interfaces.
Xilinx isn't the only company offering processors. I think everyone does -- I know Altera and Lattice do -- and they offer both the more comprehensive 32 RISC and a simple 8 bit device. Some of these devices can be quite cheap; Lattice's parts in particular are too cheap to bother turning into ASICs unless you're in the toy business or something like that.