FPGA for dummies

[mongo]

That's a waste of time and money.  It defeats the entire purpose of the Replay board which is to inexpensively recreate in hardware the classic Amigas that are so hard to come by anymore these days.

That is not the entire purpose of the Replay board.

[mongo]

Thanks Fats,

I am a little surprised that more people have not researched XCore and the XMOS chips in detail, since they are included in the newest flagship of the AmigaOne line.

I know not everyone can afford one, but I thought maybe some of the X1000 beta testers could comment on what the XMOS chips is and what it can and cannot do, without infringing on their NDA's with A-Eon.

Just a general statement or two about how they differ from FPGA's, since both appear to be programmable chips.  One using VHDL, or Verilog and the other using the "C" language with X extensions to program them.

I guess the people that know are too busy to be reading this thread.  I will have to do more research on my own, but was hoping one of the experts would chime in.

Where are you Steve Solie?  You might not be an expert on XMOS, but I'll bet you can shed some light on my questions.

The XMOS chip is a CPU. It contains no programmable logic and is nothing at all like a FPGA.

[mongo]

Please elaborate!

That is not what I came to understand from my short read of their site, but then I am here asking for clarification, because I am not sure exactly what they are.

Are you saying that they are nothing more than a specialized CPU that runs modified "C" code?

It's a CPU that supports 8 threads per core. It doesn't run C code, at least not directly. You have to compile your programs with their version of GCC. XC is a version of GCC that has extensions to support multi-threading and possibly some of the other hardware on the chip.