Digilent Nexys Video

[hamster_nz]

Digilent Inc have just released their Nexys Video FPGA board.

It has the largest Artix-7 you can get (200T) - 740 DSP slices,

Features HDMI sink, HDMI source, Gigabit Ethernet and others, 512MB DDR3, as well a mini display port interface.

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,719,1476&Prod=NEXYS-VIDEO



I managed to get one a little early and have been using it for real-time 1920x1080 fractals without using any frame buffer memory:



(yeah, sorry for the cell-phone video...)

It is about 120 billion 36-bit operations per second, every second.

[MrMetthew]

Awesome that you can do that without buffering! Real nice demo you've made, that's just beautiful!! But I would prefer them to release another board around the zynq-7000, cause I'm in the market for one of those :p

[slateraptor]

I noticed that the product table for Xilinx ISE has XC7A200T listed as WebPACK-targetable.

Is vanilla WebPACK really all that's required to play with full hardware resources, or is the devil hidden in the details?

[Scrts]

I noticed that the product table for Xilinx ISE has XC7A200T listed as WebPACK-targetable.

Is vanilla WebPACK really all that's required to play with full hardware resources, or is the devil hidden in the details?

For half-a-thousand USD board, the WebPack should do...

[hamster_nz]

I noticed that the product table for Xilinx ISE has XC7A200T listed as WebPACK-targetable.

Is vanilla WebPACK really all that's required to play with full hardware resources, or is the devil hidden in the details?

I'm using Vivado WebPACK version (which does work on Win8 without pratting around with DLLs), but I understand that ISE WebPack does work too. I could test it with ISE if it is important to you.

The big difference between Xilinx Vivado and Altera's Quartus from an FPGA design point of view is that Quartus gives you SignalTap as part of the no-cost version, and Xilinx doesn't.  I'm toying with the idea of making a generic SUMP logic analyzer component so I can use that when I get stuck...

Also I don't play with the embedded CPU stuff often, so can't comment on that side of things.

[slateraptor]

For half-a-thousand USD board, the WebPack should do...

A quick distributor search shows the FPGA alone as >$200 a pop in 1-off quantities for the least capable in the 200T line, and available only in high-density BGA packages. $500 USD for a dev board of this caliber is really quite fair (heavily subsidized and/or loss leader is what I suspect), and Digilent's target market for this platform is clearly not the typical hobbyist.

That being said, $500 is not exactly pocket change, and "should do" simply doesn't cut it if the consequences of being wrong means true cost of ownership increases +$3k for an appropriate license.

I'm using Vivado WebPACK version (which does work on Win8 without pratting around with DLLs), but I understand that ISE WebPack does work too. I could test it with ISE if it is important to you.

The big difference between Xilinx Vivado and Altera's Quartus from an FPGA design point of view is that Quartus gives you SignalTap as part of the no-cost version, and Xilinx doesn't.  I'm toying with the idea of making a generic SUMP logic analyzer component so I can use that when I get stuck...

Also I don't play with the embedded CPU stuff often, so can't comment on that side of things.

Thanks for the feedback.