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> you see they have ARM SoCs rather than Xylinx FGPAs

It's a mixed chip: FPGA and traditional SoC glued together. This mean you don't have a softcore MCU taking up precious FPGA resources just to do some basic management tasks.

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Ah that makes sense. It's slightly ironic then that the ARM SoC includes a Mali GPU which presumably easily outperforms what can be achieved with the FGPA.

I didn't see any mention of what the software on the Zynq's ARM core is doing, which made me wonder why use Zynq at all.

The hardened DisplayPort IP is connected to the ARM cores, and requires a significant amount of configuration and setup. FuryGpu's firmware primarily handles interfacing with that block: setting up descriptor sets to DMA video frame and audio data from memory (where the GPU has written it for video, or where the host has DMA'd it for audio), responding to requests to reconfigure things for different resolutions, etc. There's also a small command processor there that lets me do various things that building out hardware for doesn't make sense - moving memory around with the hardened DMA peripheral, setting up memory buffers used internally by the GPU, etc. If I ever need to expose a VGA interface in order to have motherboards treat this as a primary graphics output device during boot, I'd also be handling all of that in the firmware.

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