FPGA programming interest

[theover]

Hi all,

I too want to express I am glad with this innitiative, and hope at some point to be able to buy one or more of the $99 Z7010/Adaptiva chip boards. I plan on using the power of the board for audio processing tasks like (which uses ADI Blackfin) and (Lots of 192kHz/32bit fl.p. Jack/Ladspa processing, and Jamin which uses fftw3).

I recall reading the whole design would be Open Source, which I applaud, but I was wondering if the Xilinx FPGA will also be programmable, and can be used for user purposes besides connecing to and pogramming the Adaptive chip from the ARM core. (Like ) ?

Also, will the tools for programming run on the boards ARM? Not that I'd need that per se, my I7 Fedora 17/64 should be fine, but would that be possible, just as "added cool".

Theo Verelst

[aolofsson]

The Zynq FPGA is configured at boot time by the ARM processor using a bit stream located on an SD card with the rest of the boot image. I you are familiar with the Zynq programming flow, creating a custom bootable image should be easy. We intend to document the process we used in detail as soon as the platform stabilizes.

[Scorpiion]

Sounds good!

[theover]

[aolofsson]

Sounds like a great project.

In terms of the chips, we have been designing chips for 5 years now at Adapteva and have several products in the "engineering sample" stage. These engineering samples costs us hundreds of dollars each to manufacture. One of the goals of the Parallella Kickstarter fundraising was to raise enough funds to be able to buy a complete wafer mask set for our multicore Epiphany DSPs to bring down the cost (to us) of silicon to a few dollars per die.

(btw, I know the ADI blackfin very well:-) I worked at ADI for 10 years and was one of the leader designers of the ADI TigerSHARC DSPs)

[Sundance]

Hi,

For those of you that are not familiar with the concept of "WebPACK", then go here - http://www.xilinx.com/products/design-t ... ebpack.htm - and you will notice the the latest version ISE14.x does support the Z7010 that is on the Parallela. It's FREE!

The only down-side of the "WebPACK" is that is does not support use of ChipScope. What is ChipScope then?? A debuggiing tool - see http://www.xilinx.com/tools/cspro.htm. Not FREE!

So... - you thought that Epiphany was the clever bit of the Parallella Kit, but you will soon learn that the FPGA is "Mother" of the platform and everything is controlled by the FPGA.

I hope, over time, that some of you will start playing with another feature of the FPGA, called Partial-Reconfiguration. This will enable some of the FPGA to be re-programmed on-the-fly, just like the Epiphany. See http://www.xilinx.com/tools/partial-reconfiguration.htm Not FREE!

[anlumo]

Judging from the new block diagram and the information from this thread, it should be possible to reprogram the graphics card implemented by the FPGA (since it controls the HDMI port) to use the Epiphany as a coprocessor for computing the pixel shaders (or something equivalent). Is that correct?

[tnt]

Sure ... but that's a lot of work. HDL code, epiphany code, host side drivers, ....

I would assume the current implementation is just a frame buffer with everything else done in software, so no acceleration whatsoever. So going from that to an accelerated 3D card with shader support is far from trivial :p

[anlumo]

[tschaboo]