aws-fpga

Are you trying to scare people away from FPGAs? GPUs aren't actually that _good_ at deep learning, but they are in the right place at the right time. You can rent high end FPGAs on AWS, https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga there is no better time to get into FPGAs. On the low end there is the excellent https://hackaday.com/2019/01/14/ulx3s-an-open-source-lattice... Modern FPGA platforms like Xilinx Alveo have 35TB/s of SRAM bandwidth and 460GB/s of HBM bandwidth. https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/alveo/u55c.h...

See https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga/blob/master/README.md#gettin...

No, at least not directly with the way the HDK is set up out of the box; there are "Clock Recipes" you choose from at build time, and a recipe is just the pre-canned configuration. 3 different groups, each one with a chosen (single) recipe, each group giving you a few clocks of various frequencies. The clock recipe is examined as part of the "AFI Manifest" when Amazon creates FPGA images you can load, so I doubt you can go out of the way very much, here. https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga/blob/master/hdk/docs/clock_r... https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga/blob/83c80efd30862d862ea8f99...

Cool, but I think it's very unfortunate that the HDK license is so unfree -- it looks like you can't ever use the HDK outside AWS (https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga/blob/master/hdk/LICENSE.txt#...).

Yes this is cool if you're already using FPGAs and yeah, there will be a market for FPGA designers. But I also think this is FPGAs for the Rest of Us. Suddenly, FPGAs are available without having to buy some development board from Xilinx, install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain ... Me, I was thinking of FPGAs as being something I'd use down the road a few years, eventually, etc. But instead, I'm looking at this right now. This morning. Waiting for the damn 404 to go away on: https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga This reduces the barrier to entry. It also reduces the transaction cost (h/t Ronald Coase).

If you don't click through to read about this: you can write an FPGA image in verilog/VHDL and upload it... and then run it. To me that seems like magic. HDK here: https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga (I work for AWS)