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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it will have any block rams?

If so, it becomes big enough for mini CPU cores. Little CPU cores enable far more usecases - for example "upload this thing to a server via ethernet" isn't practical with 5000 gates of hardware logic, but a CPU core with 2kbytes of block ram and a little hardware logic on the side makes that kind of thing practical.

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Why don’t you want to buy classical microcontroller for such task? It’s cheaper, has more performance and faster development time. FPGA area is higher for a CPU softcore compared to a normal silicon CPU.

Not sure about GP's specific case with Ethernet, but for some tasks that "little hardware logic on the side" can be the difference between some bit-banging operation taking one clock cycle vs. 200.

There are plenty of cases where the sequential logic for an FPGA may end up resulting in something looking like a custom CPU implementation. Development wise it may end up cheaper to just pick up an existing architecture and build in custom instructions for the specific parts that make it particularly expensive (either computationally or latency wise) for a traditional CPU.

How common are MCUs with mii or gmii interfaces? Certainly more mii than gmii, and at what price points? Not very common and not too cheap in my experience.

Because of supply chain issues, for one.

Is this chip somehow special and prone to supply chain issues? I am just curious.

Edit: I get tons of marketing materials daily about new various electric components. Fun thing is that while marketing department is sending advertising I can buy the parts mostly only in 2023.

It will have BRAM. There’s a detailed information about one of these ICs in their software - ForgeFPGA Workshop.

SLG47910V has: 32kb of BRAM; 900 LUT4 equivalent; 1.8k DFFs; 5kb of distributed RAM; integrated 50MHz OSC, PLL.

Thanks for digging up those details!

Looks perfect for implementing a small 16-bit CPU core with a handful of peripherals; wonder if it'll come in a hobbyist-friendly package?

QFN-24

You can download the free toolchain now and start coding today with verilog, etc. for this target. Waiting on the datasheet from factory.

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