Hacker News Reader

Comment by mati365 | Hacker News Reader

What's special about this?

These chips usually cost $1k-$2k when bought new individually from the manufacturer

Yeah Xilinx’s pricing curve is incredibly steep. Probably makes sense since they’re used in things like defence (radar, electronic warfare) so they can sell them in low quantities for huge prices and people will still buy them.

But with decent volume they get pretty cheap - for example there are video converters they have FPGAs in them that you can buy for less than you can buy the FPGA part in single qty - which means the manufacturer of the device is getting the FPGA for 5-10% of list price.

Wanted to buy a GOWIN FPGA recently, like on Sipeed's dev boards. Mouser wanted $37 for it, more than twice what the whole devkit costs.

Meanwhile the list price from the manufacturer is $3, but it's completely impossible to order anything as an individual. Not sure why they designed a hobbyist beginner-friendly dev board around a part from a company that makes all their products impossible to buy...

So people are going to desolder the chip? This doesn't seem very hobbyist-doable. Are there people out there who build products based on scrapped FPGAs from ebay?

There are certainly people removing high-end FPGAs from surplus/scrap commercial products and reselling them.

Are we talking about physical products or cloud services?

There’s zero cloud service in the article, only physical boards decommissioned by a hyperscaler. Asking about cloud services tells me you only read the title.

I read the title and was confused why the article did not match it.

Cloud should have been title-cased (they make this mistake almost every time in the article), they bought an FPGA decommissioned by Alibaba Cloud, the subsidiary.

Not only that, but you can develop for this particular model with the no-cost Vivado license.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com