A Xilinx Kintex 7 board on AliExpress?

[colorado.rob]

Your question has been answered in this thread.  You can find a way to make it work.

[KaneTW]

These Prices for FPGA is somehow normal in china! do not worry that much

Uh huh. I'm sure China has nice deals for Xilinx parts, but we're talking about a part that is sold at ~2500USD per 1 in western countries. Is Xilinx this generous with China?

FPGA pricing at distributors is absurd. From what I can tell the markup is easily 10x, if not higher [compared to buying in volume].

[colorado.rob]

For any of those interested, I have published the board support files I have developed so far.  There are Vivado board files, which includes all clocks, both DDR3 banks, both SFP+ connectors, QSPI flash, I²C EEPROM, and GPIOs.  There is also a master XDC constraints file, UCF files for MIG, and MIG project files for both DDR3 banks.

There is still work left to be done on the PCIe, QSFP and SATA interfaces.  (If anyone knows of an open source SATA project with Linux support, please let me know.)

https://github.com/rriggs/kintex-7-hpc-v2-board-files

I have tested this by having Linux boot on a Microblaze (using buildroot), tested with both DDR3 banks, and using a 1000Base-X SFP adapter.  Network support is still dodgy, but I think that's because either the Xilinx Ethernet IP lacks decent support for SFP adapters or their device-tree support does.

The schematics are also uploaded to this repo.

There is a second QSPI flash chip on the board labelled U30 which is not documented in the schematics.  The vendor just responded with the connection information.  I'll update the board files and master constraints file with this information soon.

I am fairly new to FPGAs so I'm sure there are a lot of things that can be improved.  I am trying to learn, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I plan to upload a sample MicroBlaze Linux project with buildroot configuration to Github next.  I'd like to get the project in a more stable state first.

[lawrence11]

So what motivates the price for these things?

Does it take like 1000 chips to get one right?

Does the "die" cost like 100 million?

[mac.6]

extremely expensive R&D, expensive support and expensive manufacturing cost multiplied by margin.
You can't really amortize that on a bazillion of chips sold like processor or ram.

[Rasz]

I've bought FPGA boards from Aliexpress and possibly even this seller. They seemed to roll their own boards.

at the price I would expect it to be boards they got for free as scrap from someone who had them made for specific
project that then got cancelled

Merely going by the size of Robomasters China has >100 Universities pumping EEs. Someone has to supply all the devel tools, all financed by the government https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyshih/2019/11/22/chinas-latest-development-fund-and-the-impact-on-american-companies/

[ciclonite]

Hey, Rob! how are you? Any news with the board? I want to buy the v3 version for black friday The board worth the money?
Thanks.

[gpgpu999]

If anyone is interested, I'm selling some of these Kintex 7 dev boards that I bought from AliExpress. I tested one but otherwise haven't used them at all.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/144920938728

I've just listed one but I have a total of ten if anyone would like to take them off my hands!