I just used the Raspberry-PI V to bring up the PCIe interface on a Lattice Certus-Pro NX "Versa" board, it's very convenient.
What's cool is that the Raspberry-PI V is just fast enough to run modern desktop software, including (ack!) Microsoft Teams. I was able to give a live demo of my FPGA design by sharing the desktop during a conference call.
My only complaint is, of course, lack of SoC documentation from Broadcom.
Say what you will about Intel, but they do provide full chip documentation if you go through their NDA process. With it, I made a very nice FPGA PCIe environment on Xeon Ivy Bridge: it let me save all of the PCI config registers, then reconfigure the FPGA, then reprogram them and have the chip show up on the bus without having to reboot the server or re-enumerate. The trick is to temporarily set the root complex bit to disable PCIe error detection during the reconfiguration process.
(Was using Altera Stratix-IIgx at the time).
There is possibly another way to this, but haven't tried it:
Ah, that's a fancy trick! I remember many a time making Linux real angry with my PCIe fiddling. I believe in the end we got Partial Reconfiguration set up, where the PCIe portion of the device would not be reprogrammed but we could reload the rest. It was definitely a trade off though in terms of layout planning and space reservation.
Hmm, well the last time I did this was to get information for designing Intel Atom into an embedded system- this was ~2019 (I work for a small design firm). I remember you had to sign up for a premier account, sign a CNDA, then ask them to add the specific chipset documentation to your account. Maybe they were forgiving because these were low-end embedded chips.
Anyway, the information for the PCIe registers is in documents like this:
This was the "sign a CNDA" step. They just refused to give one to sign. The specific case was about Thunderbolt controllers, I guess they fact that they're selling licenses to the Thunderbolt trademark might also be a factor. The datasheets themselves have leaked on Mac forums, but that's not enough to build a design on…
…so the alternate option now is ASMedia USB4 chips…
For what it's worth: if you have a FT2232H adapter hanging around (and if you don't, you should consider getting one), those adapters can easily be flashed to be compatible with Vivado:
Just be careful as the counterfeit FTDI chips can have bad internal regulators etc. (Usually those small Red UART and GPIO breakout hobby PCB.)
Usually better to use the vendor supplied JTAG tools, or build your own with known good silicon. Recovering FPGA hardware is always a mixed bag of what IP and documentation is available to bring up the board. Looks like nice silicon though. =3
Also beware that FTDI has bricked swathes of gear that (often inadvertently) used counterfeit chips, via driver updates. So if you buy gear that uses an FTDI chip then if you’re unlucky want it turns out to be counterfeit, your thing might get bricked. :/
Importantly not just counterfeit chips but also completely legal clone chips. For context, for a long time Windows did not have a driver for the CDC serial communication class out of the box. But FTDI had made good Windows drivers, and their interface was easy to clone. So for a time there was a market for making 3rd-party chips implementing FTDI's interface and copying their USB id to be recognized by their driver[0]. Of course some unscrupulous sellers would inevitably try to pass those of as genuine FTDI chips. FTDI was probably not happy with either of them, with the clone chips manufacturer piggybacking of their hard work. But they could only do anything about the counterfeits, so they kinda ignored the existence of legal clones and in all their public communication only talked about taking steps to shut down counterfeit chips (most likely well knowing that their were also destroying chips of legitimate competitors).
[0] Clearly allowed at least in the US under the decision in Sega v. Accolade
The issue was, if I recall correctly, that the Microsoft CDC driver was quite buggy. This led to the situation where CDC device vendors were unwilling to produce CDC compatible devices, because the default Microsoft driver would be used and, of course, the blame for any bugginess gets pinned on the hardware vendor.
Hence the current situation of many CDC-type devices that are intentionally incompatible enough with the standard, in order to require the device vendor's own drivers which they can ensure meet their quality expectations
In general, the Microchip CDC driver was free to use.
"The CDC class has been implemented in Windows (since Windows 98), macOS and most Linux distributions. Since Windows 10, no extra information has to be given in the start-up sequence as the operating system now has a generic driver that will be used for CDC. To support older versions of Windows (Windows 7 and earlier), provide an .inf file that associates with the correct driver."
However, these will not support the high-speed bit-banged JTAG mode FTDI chips can perform with the right driver. =3
are considered copyrighted IP in North America. Many of the paid device codes are often not like other Communication Device Class drivers or free generic HID devices listed in the USB standard.
Early next year Windows 11 will be locking out unsigned drivers from the OS. Good for keeping the kernel more consistent, but could be bad for hobby hardware drivers.
Personally, I think it is ludicrous, but for 83% of users they have no other option than pay $6.32 for a $$0.43 chip. =3
Yes they may be, but in the Sega v. Accolade case I mentioned earlier it was decided that copying of both copyrighted and trademarked material for interoperability purposes is fair use. In that case Accolade had to literally embed "SEGA" inside their ROM and send the text to the Genesis III in order for it to boot their games. The Ninth Circuit court ruled that this constituted fair use.
> copycats are free to write thier own drivers though?
Sure, anyone paying for a Microsoft certified hardware driver, USB PID allocation, and cert fees every year... Everyone else is not allowed in the OS we paid for...
It is a decades old serial port emulation chip... Racketeering with a computer should still be illegal. =3
Hardware drivers not certified by the Microsoft lab will not install. No longer can folks dismiss the nag screen to run some bespoke piece of hardware.
This is apparently being done to improve kernel security and reliability. It could be a PR disaster depending how it is rolled out...
People can blame things like the old generic PC-case-bling LED driver CVE people and even its original author lost patience with years ago... lol =3
Hardware drivers not certified by the Microsoft lab will not install. No longer can folks dismiss the nag screen to run some bespoke piece of hardware.
Again, that's been the case since Windows 7. You have to go out of your way to boot the system in "Test Mode" to install an unsigned driver. Either that, or use Zadig to self-sign the driver. (Maybe they're no longer allowing that?)
Signatures were enforced only for 64-bit drivers in Windows 7, but Windows 10 enforces them for all drivers.
There is nothing in that article saying anything about any upcoming requirements. Also it is written by a ChatGPT bot account, so it would be an invalid source even if it did.
The only update even mentioned in that article is "Windows 10, version 1607 (the Anniversary Update released in August 2016)". In case you haven't noticed, that happened 9 years ago...
If at some point I can recall the interview from earlier this year, than I will post a link. Otherwise, we will both have to wait and see. Best regards. =3
What is "it" that might break something? There is nothing that is going to happen. The AI-slop you linked doesn't mention anything that is going to happen. It's just a summary of changes that have happened in the past and a list of pros and cons of the driver signing requirement from more than a decade ago. There is nothing to "wait and see" for.
It goes well beyond strict USB-C port WHCP compliance rules if I recall correctly, and is not about just banning old WinRing 0 nuisance drivers ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_O5JtBqODA ).
I can't put any significant time into a proper search right now, but if I recall the interview I'll post a URI. Have a great day. =3
I can kinda see where the idea of "copyrighting a number" makes sense when you're talking about a number that's multiple kilobytes in size, but trying to stake a legal claim to one of the 65536 possible 16-bit numbers is just wrong imo.
Indeed, the USB standards body prevented allocated company VID reuse, and thus greatly simplified identifying the correct hardware. There is also additional generic information like company name (often Trademarked) or serial number that may be queried from many devices as well.
If it were free or cheap, than people would have just started another domain squatting business. That could have been far worse. =3
The issue is (as I understand it) that some early supply chain distributors either unwittingly bought shipments of counterfeit parts, or otherwise ended up stocking them as genuine. Then legitimate hardware manufacturers used them. And let's be upfront here, any part using FTDI USB interfaces is low volume hardware that's either indie or, like, niche scientific gear. These are not chips you use when you have a 20-person hardware procurement department with the time to do a deep dive into every shipment of every component. These are chips you use when you're used to serial ports and have had USB foisted upon you and just want to sell the thing you built.
Sending it back only punishes the OEM you bought the weird niche thing off, and they likely had no indication that the chips they paid genuine prices for were counterfeit. If they try to get a refund from Alibaba or DigiKey or whoever, they'll politely be told to fuck off, if they get a response at all.
I totally understand why FTDI chose to take this path, but I also think it was a poor choice overall and I now avoid FTDI products (which back in the day I happily used, before all this) just in case I get caught up in the BS.
Cisco use these chips inside their switches, they are all over the place. I still think this is good, I buy them from RS, any authorised distributor will not tell you to 'fuck off', if they do please forward it to FTDI. If you're buying off Alibaba or eBay then that's on you. Sorry.
Penalizing FTDI for the OEM's negligence in not properly securing their supply chain? That's absurd. It is 100% the responsibility of the OEM to vet their suppliers to ensure that they know what's going into their product.
Specifically, the FT232RL - a simple USB-to-serial chip. (And many of the clones are actually quite high quality.) As far as I'm aware, the FT2232H - a more complex USB to various-serial-and-parallel-protocols chip - hasn't had a counterfeiting problem, although I believe WCH has made some compatible parts.
The STM32F103(C8) situation is pretty funny too. Most of the companies making clones have long since moved on from outright counterfeits and have started manufacturing their own more-or-less-compatible XYZ32F103 microcontrollers (e.g. GD32F103, AT32F103, APM32F103, CH32F103, HK32F103, etc).
I’ve always been curious why there’s no generic USB serial chip. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world. I’ve noticed ESP32 boards tend to come with one of two proprietary chips, with their own drivers. Do you know why this isn’t all standard?
As someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the USB CDC drivers (the closest thing to a "generic USB serial" interface) on Windows were buggy for a very long time, so vendors avoided it. It'd be feasible to make one now, but there's no compelling reason for vendors to change, either.
The generic CDC class does not support high-speed bit-bang JTAG modes. Most ESP32 chips have a built in boot-loader for normal 3.3v UART protocols.
Retro computer eMMC memory-recovery hardware like the xgecu T76 is a USB3.0 device with built in FPGA and gpio voltage-level-shifters. It may eventually solve a lot of the hobby diagnostic/recovery tool issues, but the Beta software is currently Windows only. There is a FOSS project that should port to Linux and MacOS systems soon:
Keep in mind, the software is still being built, but I'd keep an eye open for full-speed JTAG support releases in the next year or so. YMMV Best regards =3
minipro already runs on macOS and Linux. There's better tools out there for general-purpose IO, though - the Glasgow Explorer [1] is probably best in class, for instance. (Although one place where MiniPro-type devices outperform it is in interacting with old EEPROMs which require >5V Vpp.)
I _do_ happen to have one laying around from another project, weirdly enough. I've never done FPGA work though, when you say it's compatible with Vivado, what does that mean in practice? I can configure an AMD FPGA, or something more?
Vivado, along with expensive adaptors, supports some JTAG dongles that are just FT2232 with an EEPROM that contains USB descriptors that Vivado recognizes and treats as a (some low cost onboard adaptor for Digilent boards, IIRC) supported adapter.
https://gist.github.com/rikka0w0/24b58b54473227502fa0334bbe7...
If you like FT2232, you’ll love the Tigard board that takes a FT2232H and adds level shifters and is basically as tricked out as you can make a FTDI adapter.
https://github.com/tigard-tools/tigard
Vivado offers some embedded debugging and logic analyzer infrastructure, which allows you to tap into signals within the design and monitor them from the PC. (For instance, the Memory Interface Generator will report its initialisation status to the PC and if something failed it will tell you what). This is done over JTAG, and Vivado will only support that when using a select few JTAG dongles.
If you're happy to create your own debugging infrastructure (which isn't that hard - almost all FPGAs have at least two dedicated IR scancodes specifically for user applications) then you can use any JTAG dongle supported by OpenOCD.
I think they mean it can be flashed into a programer/jtag interface compatible with vivado. If you want to get started with fpga, may I recommend 1bitsquared.com 's products
Basically they achieved massive improvements in throughput and latencies vs RocksDB, for some operations even an order of magnitude.
They even offered this as a service, but eventually pulled out. Not sure if they are still using it, but I was surprised that pretty much nobody else, as far as I am aware, is using any hardware acceleration for repetitive database workloads.
AWS was using in house hardware query acceleration in redshift a few years back https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aqua-advanced-query-acc.... I dont know how much attention its getting (or performance its bringing) since AWS started focusing more in P&L the past year or two.
If you are interested in FPGA PCIe or PCI cards there are also a lot of Gidel boards available second hand. ProcSpark/ProcStar etc. The official software is proprietary and they often contain multiple FPGA devices so there is again an exercise working out the pinouts etc if you want to simply use them with Quartus. I got one with a massive Stratix IV on.
A Kintel UltraScale+ is quite a prize though, really nice write up.
The top-level Verilog module and Vivado .xdc file (contains pin mappings, timing constraints, etc) from Gidel for the HawkEye 20G-48. [0] No SDK from Gidel though.
My back burner project for them is to create a PCIe TLP sniffer/MiTM/device emulator by hooking up two together via 10 GbE for relaying TLPs with one of the remaining 10 GbE connection going to a host PC for the sniffed/injected TLPs. The Aria 10 FPGA PCIe hard IP allows for either root or endpoint mode so I “just” need to draw the rest of the owl, avoiding any Quartus IP modules that would make the setup non-transparent.
I’m not sure what using a 10 Gbit link for PCIe will be like with faster devices but fail0verflow got away with TLP proxying with 115200 baud UART. [1]
That's cool. For those who happened to be in China right now, there's the same listing on a Chinese marketplace (idlefish) for only 480 CNY (~68 USD). That's... better than too good to be true. I'm going to have a try.
I checked out the listings on idlefish and I was able to find some with 350 CNY (~48 USD). That seems like a really really good deal. Please, do keep us updated with your findings after you've purchased it.
Is anyone aware of any examples of FPGAs used to implement neural nets or other connectionist architectures?
What's exciting about FPGAs is that they make "custom" chips affordable for colleges and even individuals... At this point in time, with the AI world fixated on LLMs, it seems that there's an opportunity for small groups/individuals to use FPGAs to experiment with more animal-like ground-up approaches to intelligence.
> Is anyone aware of any examples of FPGAs used to implement neural nets or other connectionist architectures?
Do you mean as a specialized processor for high speed inference, or as if the neural net including weights was directly synthesized into the FPGA architecture?
Neither use case would be as powerful as other options. FPGAs don’t provide infinite leeway for implementing completely custom logic. They have a finite number of blocks that can be reconfigured in certain ways as synthesized by the software. This architecture isn’t a good fit for the large LLMs we think about which need a lot of high bandwidth memory access. You can connect an FPGA to high speed memory, but the current crop of GPUs are going to be much better at the job.
Why the downvotes? My understanding ai is not a use for fpgas because models require a lot of ram (preferably fast ram) and fpga themselves don’t have a lot of it. An fpga will have pins you can attach fast ram, but then board layout and layering traces becomes very non trivial. Hence gfx cards (and a lot of them) are more suited.
FPGA certainly not ideal for an experimental AI architecture, but if data is just flowing thru it (sensory input in, motor control out) then I don't see RAM as an issue. Could be an interesting option for experimenting on a mobile robot.
Sure - not as fast or flexible, but relatively cheap and reprogrammable - good for experimentation, maybe for building a real-world proof-of-concept of a learning architecture ?
This doesn't actually matter in practice, because either nobody produces your specific architecture in the first place, or the existing architectures are significantly more power inefficient.
FPGAs run at reduced clock speeds, but then again, you'd have to run the GPU or CPU at the same clock speed to obtain the same energy efficiency.
I don't see if they found out the pinouts for the SFP connectors on the back. If those were documented, and the PCI-e lanes were documented, I could see someone having some real fun with these building some bespoke fiber networking gear.
SFP transceivers are just that- transceivers, they will spit out what you put in, so you could even build some interesting bespoke fiber optic signaling gear with these, and a PCIe backplane, or just solo.
> SFP transceivers are just that- transceivers, they will spit out what you put in
This is only valid for ≤10Gbaud SFP(+) transceivers. SFP28 have CDR chips in them that will balk at doing anything other than supported rates, e.g. {25.78125, 26.5625, 27.952…} Gbd. Even supporting 10.3125Gbd is not a given.
(You can put other things on them, but you need to match a supported rate.)
Is there any RAM on the board except for the on-chip block RAMs?
The ebay listing mentions 128 MB, but I wonder if this can be trusted since some other information in the "item specifics" overview is clearly bogus ("7-Function Digital Multimeter Shield").
That’s really nice! Cheap hardware was gone during covid years completely. And now beautiful Kintex for 200$ again. I was super interested in these when I was younger. 2x SFP with PCIe reminds me on NetFPGA project. This card is perfect for it!!
- there's not much of a moat long term in inference hardware (can't comment about training)
- the models themselves are a commodity that can be swapped any day
- the products are coming but not at the pace one thought. It's been 3 years since Chatgpt launched and we still have no decent service where I can inject documents and ask questions.
What do you mean by inject documents and ask questions? Doesn't Gemini let you do that, e.g. NotebookLM or Gem? (not sure what's the equivalent products from the other vendors)
Not a great experience still, doesn't scale, not precise enough, still looks to be rag based, so you get the usual problems rag can't solve due to chunking, etc.
[ 0.495759] pci 0000:01:00.0: [dabc:1017] type 00 class 0x020000
...
Since most people might not be intimately as familiar with PCIe terminology, allow me to quickly document what is going on here.
0000:00:00.0: is the identifier ...
[14e4:2712]: is the device’s [vendor id:device id], these vendor id identifiers are assigned by the PCI standard body to hardware vendors. Vendors are then free to define there own vendor id’s.
> Wouldn't it be really nice if dmesg had more info about devices?
No, it wouldn't, that'd just make the kernel another 1.5MB larger. It's large enough as it is. And if there is a driver for the device, the driver will print more things anyway.
Remember you're dealing with low-level system interfacing here. You're expected to bring some knowledge.
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’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.
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.
Vivado has free and paid tiers. The free tiers ("WebPack") support their a myriad of their smaller devices (which includes the Kria boards). The larger devices (Virtex, etc.), however, are generally only supported by the paid versions of Vivado.
It's inconvenient for hobbyists, sure, but for enterprise uses the cost of Vivado for a team is largely inconsequential (which I suspect is why they get away with this).
The licensing scheme is not terribly robust, either; there are a number of cracked (full) licenses floating around if you know where to look. Given that AMD makes most of their money on hardware sales, and the software is only really useful in conjunction with that hardware, I suspect they don't care very much.
It is clear from the quality that all vendors of EDA software actively hate their paying customers.
Just wonder - why are EDA tools just now starting to get HiDPI support? I’m pretty sure Altera, Xilinx/AMD, etc haven’t bought HiDPI monitors for their own developers!
I just used the Raspberry-PI V to bring up the PCIe interface on a Lattice Certus-Pro NX "Versa" board, it's very convenient.
What's cool is that the Raspberry-PI V is just fast enough to run modern desktop software, including (ack!) Microsoft Teams. I was able to give a live demo of my FPGA design by sharing the desktop during a conference call.
My only complaint is, of course, lack of SoC documentation from Broadcom.
Say what you will about Intel, but they do provide full chip documentation if you go through their NDA process. With it, I made a very nice FPGA PCIe environment on Xeon Ivy Bridge: it let me save all of the PCI config registers, then reconfigure the FPGA, then reprogram them and have the chip show up on the bus without having to reboot the server or re-enumerate. The trick is to temporarily set the root complex bit to disable PCIe error detection during the reconfiguration process.
(Was using Altera Stratix-IIgx at the time).
There is possibly another way to this, but haven't tried it:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32334870/how-to-do-a-tru...
But even aside from that, with the documentation you have access to a lot of error reporting which is extremely useful during PCIe bring-up.
Ah, that's a fancy trick! I remember many a time making Linux real angry with my PCIe fiddling. I believe in the end we got Partial Reconfiguration set up, where the PCIe portion of the device would not be reprogrammed but we could reload the rest. It was definitely a trade off though in terms of layout planning and space reservation.
> Say what you will about Intel, but they do provide full chip documentation if you go through their NDA process.
Unfortunately, we are unable to support individuals or smaller entities. Please reach out to your local Intel sales office for assistance.
Are we talking about the same Intel?
(This is the reply I got trying to sign their NDA in order to access datasheets. Even my 15-people employer wasn't worth their time.)
Hmm, well the last time I did this was to get information for designing Intel Atom into an embedded system- this was ~2019 (I work for a small design firm). I remember you had to sign up for a premier account, sign a CNDA, then ask them to add the specific chipset documentation to your account. Maybe they were forgiving because these were low-end embedded chips.
Anyway, the information for the PCIe registers is in documents like this:
https://theretroweb.com/misc/documentation/324642-003-67f43c...
This was the "sign a CNDA" step. They just refused to give one to sign. The specific case was about Thunderbolt controllers, I guess they fact that they're selling licenses to the Thunderbolt trademark might also be a factor. The datasheets themselves have leaked on Mac forums, but that's not enough to build a design on…
…so the alternate option now is ASMedia USB4 chips…
For what it's worth: if you have a FT2232H adapter hanging around (and if you don't, you should consider getting one), those adapters can easily be flashed to be compatible with Vivado:
https://docs.amd.com/r/en-US/ug908-vivado-programming-debugg...
At work we always have 20-30x FT2232H on stock.
They are super useful - they speak GPIO, I2C, SPI, parallel FIFO, etc.
And their pyFTDI Python lib is great.
Just be careful as the counterfeit FTDI chips can have bad internal regulators etc. (Usually those small Red UART and GPIO breakout hobby PCB.)
Usually better to use the vendor supplied JTAG tools, or build your own with known good silicon. Recovering FPGA hardware is always a mixed bag of what IP and documentation is available to bring up the board. Looks like nice silicon though. =3
Also beware that FTDI has bricked swathes of gear that (often inadvertently) used counterfeit chips, via driver updates. So if you buy gear that uses an FTDI chip then if you’re unlucky want it turns out to be counterfeit, your thing might get bricked. :/
Importantly not just counterfeit chips but also completely legal clone chips. For context, for a long time Windows did not have a driver for the CDC serial communication class out of the box. But FTDI had made good Windows drivers, and their interface was easy to clone. So for a time there was a market for making 3rd-party chips implementing FTDI's interface and copying their USB id to be recognized by their driver[0]. Of course some unscrupulous sellers would inevitably try to pass those of as genuine FTDI chips. FTDI was probably not happy with either of them, with the clone chips manufacturer piggybacking of their hard work. But they could only do anything about the counterfeits, so they kinda ignored the existence of legal clones and in all their public communication only talked about taking steps to shut down counterfeit chips (most likely well knowing that their were also destroying chips of legitimate competitors).
[0] Clearly allowed at least in the US under the decision in Sega v. Accolade
The issue was, if I recall correctly, that the Microsoft CDC driver was quite buggy. This led to the situation where CDC device vendors were unwilling to produce CDC compatible devices, because the default Microsoft driver would be used and, of course, the blame for any bugginess gets pinned on the hardware vendor.
Hence the current situation of many CDC-type devices that are intentionally incompatible enough with the standard, in order to require the device vendor's own drivers which they can ensure meet their quality expectations
In general, the Microchip CDC driver was free to use.
"The CDC class has been implemented in Windows (since Windows 98), macOS and most Linux distributions. Since Windows 10, no extra information has to be given in the start-up sequence as the operating system now has a generic driver that will be used for CDC. To support older versions of Windows (Windows 7 and earlier), provide an .inf file that associates with the correct driver."
However, these will not support the high-speed bit-banged JTAG mode FTDI chips can perform with the right driver. =3
Many Chip VID:PID listed in
> lsusb
or
C:\> Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object { $_.InstanceId -match '^USB' } | Format-List
are considered copyrighted IP in North America. Many of the paid device codes are often not like other Communication Device Class drivers or free generic HID devices listed in the USB standard.
Early next year Windows 11 will be locking out unsigned drivers from the OS. Good for keeping the kernel more consistent, but could be bad for hobby hardware drivers.
Personally, I think it is ludicrous, but for 83% of users they have no other option than pay $6.32 for a $$0.43 chip. =3
> are considered copyrighted IP in North America.
Yes they may be, but in the Sega v. Accolade case I mentioned earlier it was decided that copying of both copyrighted and trademarked material for interoperability purposes is fair use. In that case Accolade had to literally embed "SEGA" inside their ROM and send the text to the Genesis III in order for it to boot their games. The Ninth Circuit court ruled that this constituted fair use.
The copycats are free to write thier own drivers though? They could even open source them. Why should they get to steal them from FDTI?
I do agree the cost of the chips are insane however, they're ultimately worth paying for because of the driver support and 'just works' factor.
> copycats are free to write thier own drivers though?
Sure, anyone paying for a Microsoft certified hardware driver, USB PID allocation, and cert fees every year... Everyone else is not allowed in the OS we paid for...
It is a decades old serial port emulation chip... Racketeering with a computer should still be illegal. =3
They're not stealing anything.
Early next year Windows 11 will be locking out unsigned drivers from the OS.
That's been the case since Windows 7 for 64-bit drivers, hasn't it? What's changing with 11?
Hardware drivers not certified by the Microsoft lab will not install. No longer can folks dismiss the nag screen to run some bespoke piece of hardware.
This is apparently being done to improve kernel security and reliability. It could be a PR disaster depending how it is rolled out...
People can blame things like the old generic PC-case-bling LED driver CVE people and even its original author lost patience with years ago... lol =3
Hardware drivers not certified by the Microsoft lab will not install. No longer can folks dismiss the nag screen to run some bespoke piece of hardware.
Again, that's been the case since Windows 7. You have to go out of your way to boot the system in "Test Mode" to install an unsigned driver. Either that, or use Zadig to self-sign the driver. (Maybe they're no longer allowing that?)
Signatures were enforced only for 64-bit drivers in Windows 7, but Windows 10 enforces them for all drivers.
The policy is covered fairly well:
https://windowsforum.com/threads/windows-driver-signing-bala...
We won't know the actual collateral damage till the update is released. =)
There is nothing in that article saying anything about any upcoming requirements. Also it is written by a ChatGPT bot account, so it would be an invalid source even if it did.
The only update even mentioned in that article is "Windows 10, version 1607 (the Anniversary Update released in August 2016)". In case you haven't noticed, that happened 9 years ago...
Not sure if it potentially will break the Win11 reboot unsigned install method:
https://youtu.be/ETqvtZomqV8?si=-gd34UzaLNDNNDc7&t=50
If at some point I can recall the interview from earlier this year, than I will post a link. Otherwise, we will both have to wait and see. Best regards. =3
What is "it" that might break something? There is nothing that is going to happen. The AI-slop you linked doesn't mention anything that is going to happen. It's just a summary of changes that have happened in the past and a list of pros and cons of the driver signing requirement from more than a decade ago. There is nothing to "wait and see" for.
It goes well beyond strict USB-C port WHCP compliance rules if I recall correctly, and is not about just banning old WinRing 0 nuisance drivers ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_O5JtBqODA ).
I can't put any significant time into a proper search right now, but if I recall the interview I'll post a URI. Have a great day. =3
I can kinda see where the idea of "copyrighting a number" makes sense when you're talking about a number that's multiple kilobytes in size, but trying to stake a legal claim to one of the 65536 possible 16-bit numbers is just wrong imo.
Indeed, the USB standards body prevented allocated company VID reuse, and thus greatly simplified identifying the correct hardware. There is also additional generic information like company name (often Trademarked) or serial number that may be queried from many devices as well.
If it were free or cheap, than people would have just started another domain squatting business. That could have been far worse. =3
Good, FR. Then you can send it back to who you bought it from. All vendors should do this.
The issue is (as I understand it) that some early supply chain distributors either unwittingly bought shipments of counterfeit parts, or otherwise ended up stocking them as genuine. Then legitimate hardware manufacturers used them. And let's be upfront here, any part using FTDI USB interfaces is low volume hardware that's either indie or, like, niche scientific gear. These are not chips you use when you have a 20-person hardware procurement department with the time to do a deep dive into every shipment of every component. These are chips you use when you're used to serial ports and have had USB foisted upon you and just want to sell the thing you built.
Sending it back only punishes the OEM you bought the weird niche thing off, and they likely had no indication that the chips they paid genuine prices for were counterfeit. If they try to get a refund from Alibaba or DigiKey or whoever, they'll politely be told to fuck off, if they get a response at all.
I totally understand why FTDI chose to take this path, but I also think it was a poor choice overall and I now avoid FTDI products (which back in the day I happily used, before all this) just in case I get caught up in the BS.
Cisco use these chips inside their switches, they are all over the place. I still think this is good, I buy them from RS, any authorised distributor will not tell you to 'fuck off', if they do please forward it to FTDI. If you're buying off Alibaba or eBay then that's on you. Sorry.
Penalizing FTDI for the OEM's negligence in not properly securing their supply chain? That's absurd. It is 100% the responsibility of the OEM to vet their suppliers to ensure that they know what's going into their product.
Not all FTDI series are faked. Only the most popular FT232 as far as I know.
Same for ST. Only the STM32F103 is a well known bad actor in the market.
> Only the most popular FT232 as far as I know.
Specifically, the FT232RL - a simple USB-to-serial chip. (And many of the clones are actually quite high quality.) As far as I'm aware, the FT2232H - a more complex USB to various-serial-and-parallel-protocols chip - hasn't had a counterfeiting problem, although I believe WCH has made some compatible parts.
The STM32F103(C8) situation is pretty funny too. Most of the companies making clones have long since moved on from outright counterfeits and have started manufacturing their own more-or-less-compatible XYZ32F103 microcontrollers (e.g. GD32F103, AT32F103, APM32F103, CH32F103, HK32F103, etc).
I’ve always been curious why there’s no generic USB serial chip. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world. I’ve noticed ESP32 boards tend to come with one of two proprietary chips, with their own drivers. Do you know why this isn’t all standard?
As someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the USB CDC drivers (the closest thing to a "generic USB serial" interface) on Windows were buggy for a very long time, so vendors avoided it. It'd be feasible to make one now, but there's no compelling reason for vendors to change, either.
The generic CDC class does not support high-speed bit-bang JTAG modes. Most ESP32 chips have a built in boot-loader for normal 3.3v UART protocols.
Retro computer eMMC memory-recovery hardware like the xgecu T76 is a USB3.0 device with built in FPGA and gpio voltage-level-shifters. It may eventually solve a lot of the hobby diagnostic/recovery tool issues, but the Beta software is currently Windows only. There is a FOSS project that should port to Linux and MacOS systems soon:
https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/minipro.git
Keep in mind, the software is still being built, but I'd keep an eye open for full-speed JTAG support releases in the next year or so. YMMV Best regards =3
minipro already runs on macOS and Linux. There's better tools out there for general-purpose IO, though - the Glasgow Explorer [1] is probably best in class, for instance. (Although one place where MiniPro-type devices outperform it is in interacting with old EEPROMs which require >5V Vpp.)
[1]: https://glasgow-embedded.org/
In my experience the f103 clones fix silicon bugs and some even have improved peripherals (like i2c)
Problem is that they still using the ST HAL which is not aware of the fixes in the background.
90% of the standard stuff will work. But as soon as you dig into the exotic modes bad things will happen.
I _do_ happen to have one laying around from another project, weirdly enough. I've never done FPGA work though, when you say it's compatible with Vivado, what does that mean in practice? I can configure an AMD FPGA, or something more?
Vivado, along with expensive adaptors, supports some JTAG dongles that are just FT2232 with an EEPROM that contains USB descriptors that Vivado recognizes and treats as a (some low cost onboard adaptor for Digilent boards, IIRC) supported adapter. https://gist.github.com/rikka0w0/24b58b54473227502fa0334bbe7...
If you like FT2232, you’ll love the Tigard board that takes a FT2232H and adds level shifters and is basically as tricked out as you can make a FTDI adapter. https://github.com/tigard-tools/tigard
Vivado offers some embedded debugging and logic analyzer infrastructure, which allows you to tap into signals within the design and monitor them from the PC. (For instance, the Memory Interface Generator will report its initialisation status to the PC and if something failed it will tell you what). This is done over JTAG, and Vivado will only support that when using a select few JTAG dongles.
If you're happy to create your own debugging infrastructure (which isn't that hard - almost all FPGAs have at least two dedicated IR scancodes specifically for user applications) then you can use any JTAG dongle supported by OpenOCD.
I think they mean it can be flashed into a programer/jtag interface compatible with vivado. If you want to get started with fpga, may I recommend 1bitsquared.com 's products
Reminds me how Alibaba innovated in database space with a cluster of FPGAs doing LSM compaction with custom MySQL storage engine - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3299869.3314041
Basically they achieved massive improvements in throughput and latencies vs RocksDB, for some operations even an order of magnitude.
They even offered this as a service, but eventually pulled out. Not sure if they are still using it, but I was surprised that pretty much nobody else, as far as I am aware, is using any hardware acceleration for repetitive database workloads.
AWS was using in house hardware query acceleration in redshift a few years back https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aqua-advanced-query-acc.... I dont know how much attention its getting (or performance its bringing) since AWS started focusing more in P&L the past year or two.
If you are interested in FPGA PCIe or PCI cards there are also a lot of Gidel boards available second hand. ProcSpark/ProcStar etc. The official software is proprietary and they often contain multiple FPGA devices so there is again an exercise working out the pinouts etc if you want to simply use them with Quartus. I got one with a massive Stratix IV on.
A Kintel UltraScale+ is quite a prize though, really nice write up.
The top-level Verilog module and Vivado .xdc file (contains pin mappings, timing constraints, etc) from Gidel for the HawkEye 20G-48. [0] No SDK from Gidel though.
My back burner project for them is to create a PCIe TLP sniffer/MiTM/device emulator by hooking up two together via 10 GbE for relaying TLPs with one of the remaining 10 GbE connection going to a host PC for the sniffed/injected TLPs. The Aria 10 FPGA PCIe hard IP allows for either root or endpoint mode so I “just” need to draw the rest of the owl, avoiding any Quartus IP modules that would make the setup non-transparent.
I’m not sure what using a 10 Gbit link for PCIe will be like with faster devices but fail0verflow got away with TLP proxying with 115200 baud UART. [1]
[0]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335904285904 [1]: https://fail0verflow.com/media/33c3-slides/#/11
That's cool. For those who happened to be in China right now, there's the same listing on a Chinese marketplace (idlefish) for only 480 CNY (~68 USD). That's... better than too good to be true. I'm going to have a try.
I checked out the listings on idlefish and I was able to find some with 350 CNY (~48 USD). That seems like a really really good deal. Please, do keep us updated with your findings after you've purchased it.
Is anyone aware of any examples of FPGAs used to implement neural nets or other connectionist architectures?
What's exciting about FPGAs is that they make "custom" chips affordable for colleges and even individuals... At this point in time, with the AI world fixated on LLMs, it seems that there's an opportunity for small groups/individuals to use FPGAs to experiment with more animal-like ground-up approaches to intelligence.
Certainly, we use networks on FPGA at FNAL for inference on LHC/CMS high energy physics results. There are also cases involving microsecond control of dynamical systems. https://fastmachinelearning.org/hls4ml/ https://indico.cern.ch/event/797510/contributions/3313676/at... https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/833277/deploying-tinyml-fpga... https://ml4physicalsciences.github.io/2019/files/NeurIPS_ML4...
> Is anyone aware of any examples of FPGAs used to implement neural nets or other connectionist architectures?
Do you mean as a specialized processor for high speed inference, or as if the neural net including weights was directly synthesized into the FPGA architecture?
Neither use case would be as powerful as other options. FPGAs don’t provide infinite leeway for implementing completely custom logic. They have a finite number of blocks that can be reconfigured in certain ways as synthesized by the software. This architecture isn’t a good fit for the large LLMs we think about which need a lot of high bandwidth memory access. You can connect an FPGA to high speed memory, but the current crop of GPUs are going to be much better at the job.
Have a look into differentiable logic gate networks
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10076
Why the downvotes? My understanding ai is not a use for fpgas because models require a lot of ram (preferably fast ram) and fpga themselves don’t have a lot of it. An fpga will have pins you can attach fast ram, but then board layout and layering traces becomes very non trivial. Hence gfx cards (and a lot of them) are more suited.
FPGA certainly not ideal for an experimental AI architecture, but if data is just flowing thru it (sensory input in, motor control out) then I don't see RAM as an issue. Could be an interesting option for experimenting on a mobile robot.
FPGA will never be as fast as an ASIC. NV data center chips cant do graphics anymore, just compute.
Sure - not as fast or flexible, but relatively cheap and reprogrammable - good for experimentation, maybe for building a real-world proof-of-concept of a learning architecture ?
Funny you say that, if you look at the git repo for the blog there are a bunch of asic screenshots currently being committed.
This doesn't actually matter in practice, because either nobody produces your specific architecture in the first place, or the existing architectures are significantly more power inefficient.
FPGAs run at reduced clock speeds, but then again, you'd have to run the GPU or CPU at the same clock speed to obtain the same energy efficiency.
I don't see if they found out the pinouts for the SFP connectors on the back. If those were documented, and the PCI-e lanes were documented, I could see someone having some real fun with these building some bespoke fiber networking gear.
SFP transceivers are just that- transceivers, they will spit out what you put in, so you could even build some interesting bespoke fiber optic signaling gear with these, and a PCIe backplane, or just solo.
> SFP transceivers are just that- transceivers, they will spit out what you put in
This is only valid for ≤10Gbaud SFP(+) transceivers. SFP28 have CDR chips in them that will balk at doing anything other than supported rates, e.g. {25.78125, 26.5625, 27.952…} Gbd. Even supporting 10.3125Gbd is not a given.
(You can put other things on them, but you need to match a supported rate.)
The SFP connector pinnouts are in the pinnout section.
Is there any RAM on the board except for the on-chip block RAMs?
The ebay listing mentions 128 MB, but I wonder if this can be trusted since some other information in the "item specifics" overview is clearly bogus ("7-Function Digital Multimeter Shield").
Lots still available on eBay https://www.ebay.com/itm/167626831054
I guess there aren't any GPIO's wired up to headers or such? Any suggestions on a project for it that's a good fit?
That’s really nice! Cheap hardware was gone during covid years completely. And now beautiful Kintex for 200$ again. I was super interested in these when I was younger. 2x SFP with PCIe reminds me on NetFPGA project. This card is perfect for it!!
> Lots still available on eBay
Probably not for long: only 7 available now...
54 sold, 3 left
Not gonna lie.
This ai craze makes me think that:
- there's not much of a moat long term in inference hardware (can't comment about training)
- the models themselves are a commodity that can be swapped any day
- the products are coming but not at the pace one thought. It's been 3 years since Chatgpt launched and we still have no decent service where I can inject documents and ask questions.
What do you mean by inject documents and ask questions? Doesn't Gemini let you do that, e.g. NotebookLM or Gem? (not sure what's the equivalent products from the other vendors)
Not a great experience still, doesn't scale, not precise enough, still looks to be rag based, so you get the usual problems rag can't solve due to chunking, etc.
>The board also came with a travel case
But why? Are these boards frequently removed and physically moved around in data centers?
Or was that an eBay seller thing to protect it?
> But why?
To bring them to the field, because they’re _field_ programable gate array
/s
That’s why the trowel, I suppose.
Lol, nice one.
"""
dmesg log :
[ 0.388790] pci 0000:00:00.0: [14e4:2712] type 01 class 0x060400
[ 0.388817] pci 0000:00:00.0: PME# supported from D0 D3hot
[ 0.389752] pci 0000:00:00.0: bridge configuration invalid ([bus 00-00]), reconfiguring
[ 0.495733] brcm-pcie 1000110000.pcie: link up, 5.0 GT/s PCIe x1 (!SSC)
[ 0.495759] pci 0000:01:00.0: [dabc:1017] type 00 class 0x020000
...
Since most people might not be intimately as familiar with PCIe terminology, allow me to quickly document what is going on here.
0000:00:00.0: is the identifier ...
[14e4:2712]: is the device’s [vendor id:device id], these vendor id identifiers are assigned by the PCI standard body to hardware vendors. Vendors are then free to define there own vendor id’s.
The full list of official vendor id’s and released device id can be found : https://admin.pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/14e4 or in the linux kernel code...
"""
Wouldn't it be really nice if dmesg had more info about devices?
> Wouldn't it be really nice if dmesg had more info about devices?
No, it wouldn't, that'd just make the kernel another 1.5MB larger. It's large enough as it is. And if there is a driver for the device, the driver will print more things anyway.
Remember you're dealing with low-level system interfacing here. You're expected to bring some knowledge.
Agreed, it would be so nice. But I can also understand they might want to keep dmesg as learn as possible.
Cool stuff.
Reminds me of recycling used Mining- or LED-Controllers as they can be bought on Ali and have quite capable FPGAs.
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.
Serious competence porn. I love it.
just received a kv260 board, i thought vivado is free to use?
Vivado has free and paid tiers. The free tiers ("WebPack") support their a myriad of their smaller devices (which includes the Kria boards). The larger devices (Virtex, etc.), however, are generally only supported by the paid versions of Vivado.
It's inconvenient for hobbyists, sure, but for enterprise uses the cost of Vivado for a team is largely inconsequential (which I suspect is why they get away with this).
The licensing scheme is not terribly robust, either; there are a number of cracked (full) licenses floating around if you know where to look. Given that AMD makes most of their money on hardware sales, and the software is only really useful in conjunction with that hardware, I suspect they don't care very much.
It is clear from the quality that all vendors of EDA software actively hate their paying customers.
Just wonder - why are EDA tools just now starting to get HiDPI support? I’m pretty sure Altera, Xilinx/AMD, etc haven’t bought HiDPI monitors for their own developers!
You can typically get a free license for some boards, especially evaluation boards.
Everything is free if you continually renew your trial every 30 days.
So... what are FPGAs usually used for in this context?