ZedBoard: Xilinx Zynq 7020 development board

[johnbeetem]

After a long time with just a place-holder, http://www.zedboard.org has come to life with photos, specs, pricing, and documents. ZedBoard is a "community-supported" development board for the new Xilinx Zynq FPGA with integrated 800 MHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9. ZedBoard is IMO surprisingly expensive for a community-supported board: US$395 or US$299 for academics. But the board does do a lot: along with the Z-7020, it has 512MB DDR3, 10/100/1G Ethernet, USB, HDMI, VGA, and the list goes on. The Z-7020 FPGA has 85K logic cells, which approximates a 1.3M gate ASIC.

DRAM, Ethernet, and USB are integrated into the processor subsystem, so you can use them as a high-performance dual ARM Cortex-A9. HDMI and VGA are driven by the FPGA logic, so you can have any kind of graphics and/or video engine you want -- and you get the fun of designing it There's a high-bandwidth path between the processor subsystem and FPGA.

Personally, I'm going to wait on this as ZedBoard is pretty expensive when you consider that Xilinx markets Zynq as having "a starting point below $15" [Xcell Journal 2Q2011]. There could very well be much cheaper Zynq-based boards coming out in the near future.

[Lob0426]

Yeah that is pretty pricey. I took a long time to decide on a Panda Board at $184. I only bought it as I could not get my hands on a Panda Board xM at $149. I really wanted a Trimslice but it only seems to climb higher every time I look at it. RasPi is already having an effect on the market. I hope the VIA and some of the other boards will continue to put pressure on the industry to lower prices while raising performance.