I'm on the verge of purchasing one of these two boards, and I'm trying to make
up my mind.
On the one hand, the extra CPU MHz on the 7800 might come in handy - the plan
is to digitise incoming video to JPEG frames, and send them over the wire and I
doubt either board will have enough FPGA space to do a full video-rate JPEG
encode, so it's going to be a co-design with the ARM doing some of the work and
the FPGA doing the heavy lifting with the DCT and maybe the zig-zag/Huffman
encoding.
On the other hand, the 7300 FPGA is supported, and I'm not sure how stable /
future-proof the 7800 user-programming procedure is that I've read about.
I had a few questions to figure out whether the 7800 will do for me. I'd
greatly appreciate any feedback :)
- On the 7800 board, the FPGA is a Lattice ECP2-12 device, right ? I've never
used one of these before, but
http://www.wikifpga.com/index.php?title=Performance_Analysis puts it as
generally faster than a Spartan-3, though that chart compares an S3 at grade -4
vs the ECP2 at grade -5.
- To that point, do we know what speed-grade is used on the board ?
- Is the ECP2 used on the board programmable using the downloadable tools from
Lattice ? Reading the lattice website, it appears the ECP2 is, but the ECP2M/S
is not. I'm not sure what the difference is between the ECP2 and ECP2M/S
parts... If I have to spend $1500 on software, my decision is made for me :)
- What's the delivery turnaround time from Techologic like ? I have
Thanksgiving week off :)
- Lastly, I take it that there still isn't any strategic decision to
officially support the 7800 as a user-programmable target by Technologic
systems ?
Thanks in advance for any help :)
Simon
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