AlienCortex AV

[Granitehead]

What do you think of this?


http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/794668827/aliencortex-av

 

[mcobit]

Looks nice. This is a cortex a3 virtualising some fpgas? Good idea, but who needs so many?

 

[WizardStan]

According to the description, it is actually a Xilinx Spartan 3e 500K FPGA. No Cortex virtualization, emulation, or CPU at all.


As a geek toy, it looks very useful, but for $150 I honestly can't think of anything to do with it that couldn't be done equally well if not better with a Beagle/Pandaboard in software. I'm going to pass on this one. Well, I was going to pass anyway, since I'm trying not to spend money on more geek toys, but this time I have a reason.


What would you use it for, if you were to get one, I wonder?

 

[Granitehead]

According to the description, it is actually a Xilinx Spartan 3e 500K FPGA. No Cortex virtualization, emulation, or CPU at all.


As a geek toy, it looks very useful, but for $150 I honestly can't think of anything to do with it that couldn't be done equally well if not better with a Beagle/Pandaboard in software. I'm going to pass on this one. Well, I was going to pass anyway, since I'm trying not to spend money on more geek toys, but this time I have a reason.


What would you use it for, if you were to get one, I wonder?

I would just use it as a pure toy, try to implement stuff which doesn't need to be useful, learn more about FPGAs (haven't got any experiences with these things) - but as you said $150 is quite a bit of money and I'm not sure if it's worth it. That's why I asked for opinions on this.