What's Stopping You Building Your Next Project with an FPGA? (Please, Don't Blame the Cost!)

Like there are other obstacles than price for FPGA.

Evaluation Board, Spartan-7 50 FPGA, 256MB RAM, 4 x Pmod Headers, Vivado

Price:£103 (Price is before tax)

Like there are other obstacles than price for FPGA.

Think about it for a second, OK?

You can build a PC for that kind of money.

You can buy 50+ arduinos for that kind of money.

You can buy month worth of food for that kind of money.

You can buy 4 raspberry PI's for that kind of money + get some spare change for some small fun parts.

I think even watching a movies worth of that money is better investment than buying this board.

How delusional are this manufacturers, i bet no one in their right mind buys this garbage in a first place other than on impulse, no wonder they give this crap away for free.

Like there are other obstacles than price for FPGA.

Evaluation Board, Spartan-7 50 FPGA, 256MB RAM, 4 x Pmod Headers, Vivado

Price:£103 (Price is before tax)

Like there are other obstacles than price for FPGA.

Think about it for a second, OK?

You can build a PC for that kind of money.

You can buy 50+ arduinos for that kind of money.

You can buy month worth of food for that kind of money.

You can buy 4 raspberry PI's for that kind of money + get some spare change for some small fun parts.

I think even watching a movies worth of that money is better investment than buying this board.

How delusional are this manufacturers, i bet no one in their right mind buys this garbage in a first place other than on impulse, no wonder they give this crap away for free.

Your comment would be more credible if you had provided reasons why this product is garbage and crap.

Taking your base cost of 103 pounds which currently is roughly $145USD, is it really possible to build a functional computer with that amount? Maybe, if you do low (low) end.

One month's worth of food? Is that for one person on a strict diet? Perhaps the cost of living is less where you live.

If your comment is indicative that you will not be applying for this road test then I am sure that the other applicants thank you wholeheartedly :-) Regards.

There are things a single FPGA can do that are not possible with 5000 Arduino's, or Pi's. Specifically, throughput related or timing (accuracy) related. When you sent that message through the Internet, it probably went through infrastructure containing dozens (a hundred maybe) FPGA's across the world. The infrastructure manufacturers used FPGA's to produce the best product for a given cost. That's just one example of FPGA use. Those who can use FPGA's will earn that months' worth of food within an hour. The major obstacle is not the cost of the development board, it is the very different skill-set than for an Arduino or Raspberry Pi software programmer. Learning that skill-set ideally requires courses, or books that cost more than the development board. Some resources are free online however, and such a development board can be used to get those skills. But digital knowledge is also required (in contrast for software development on Arduino/Pi), so it is worth studying that too (there are some online resources for that too).

recurzive  wrote:

 

You can build a PC for that kind of money.

You can buy 50+ arduinos for that kind of money.

You can buy month worth of food for that kind of money.

You can buy 4 raspberry PI's for that kind of money + get some spare change for some small fun parts.

These are all irrelevant comparisons.

recurzive  wrote:

 

I think even watching a movies worth of that money is better investment than buying this board.

How delusional are this manufacturers, i bet no one in their right mind buys this garbage in a first place other than on impulse, no wonder they give this crap away for free.

Why are you being so judgemental? There are plenty of uses for FPGA's which enable you to do things which otherwise wouldn't be possible. Yes, they aren't for everybody, a lot of applications can be covered by cheap microcontroller based boards and in the hobby space this is exceedingly likely to be the case. But there are plenty of times in a development lab where you need to test a proof of concept design and need an FPGA to be part of that. This is where development boards like this come into play and at £103 this is really cheap compared to how much FPGA development boards have cost in the past. The cost of this board is small compared to the cost of one engineer for a day so if it saves a days effort it's paid for itself several times already. If it saves a board spin because something important is discovered early on it'll pay for itself tens or hundreds of times over depending on the complexity of the board under development.

If FPGA's aren't your thing and you have no uses for them then that's fine but I fail to see why you feel the need to rant about how expensive and useless you feel they are. Just ignore them and move on.