Can some one tell me what these are and how much they are worth please

[RoGeorge]

I'm not so envy to say those worth nothing.   
Handling and ESD is not such a danger.

Chances are all those FPGAs are in working condition, and perfectly reusable after reballing them.  Definitely not something to throw away or destroy for a keychain.

I would list them on e-bay, starting at bigger prices, and see how much I could get.  Maybe not list them at $50k, but for sure worth much more than $5 or $50.

[blacksheeplogic]

I wouldn’t give you $5 for the lot.
It is way too much effort for me to remove them from the boards, then clean up the solder residue, drill a hole in the corner, fit a 10c keychain… and then waste 2 hours of my time trying to sell them at my local Saturday market to people who have no idea what they are.
Hope you didn’t actually pay anything for that junk.

I was trying to finish up my reply with a positive, but yea $5 could be a bit too optimistic.

[james_s]

I think to the right person they are worth considerably more than nothing. A tiny fraction of their retail price for sure, but not zero. I mean how cool would it be to get a monster FPGA like that up and running? If I didn't have a lifetime of projects on my plate already I'd be interested in giving it a go but there are much better people than me out there to do something with one. The big problem is there are not very many of those people. It would need to be a dedicated hobbyist with FPGA experience, the sort of people building DIY high speed cameras and such. I've seen probably 4 or 5 people on YouTube who I'd give a reasonable chance of getting one working.

[Bud]

In any case they need to be reballed. I am not into FPGAs so do not know how much reballing service may cost, it may not worth the effort if the goal is to try to sell after reballing, unless you ARE the person doing reballing. The OP said he is just a flipper.

[Zucca]

If you are looking to get some cash soon I would suggest to sell the Mercedes car.
It is a faster process and you get much more money.

[james_s]

Well ultimately they're worth whatever someone will pay for one. If it were me, I'd post them on ebay one board at a time with a starting bid of 99c and see where they go.

[Kilrah]

Handling and ESD is not such a danger.

Chances are all those FPGAs are in working condition, and perfectly reusable after reballing them.  Definitely not something to throw away or destroy for a keychain.

If you have a project that can make use of it you'll have hundreds of thousands of $ invested in the design already. Just delaying the project in case one of them is faulty would cost more than buying new ones...

[mikeselectricstuff]

Classic case of value being vastly different from cost.
Anyone who already uses these isn't going to buy used ones.
If they are too big to be supported by the free tools, then they are useless to hobbyists,and  even if they are useable, they'd need an expensive multilayer PCB and good reflow process.

Just stick the board on ebay as-is and see what happens.

[NorthGuy]

Anyone who already uses these isn't going to buy used ones.

Actually, if I was working on a board which uses exact same part and had some PCB printed, I would give these a try.

[dagema]

I got a license for Vivado for free when I bought an Arty from Digilent. I also later bought a Vivado license from Digilent for USD 50.

[memset]

Pretty old topic, but I'd like to reply, just for historical reasons.
These boards seem to be a part of Qualcomm's custom ASIC emulator called Rumi. There are some "RUMI4, Firetail" markings on these boards. So, these boards may be coming from FPGA-emulation machines of their server-targeted ARM processor codenamed Firetail.

Dunno why all the boards have their central chip removed. Maybe it was the only surviving chip, and they removed it prior to throwing away these damaged boards.


Also, I've seen some parts of their earlier (and pretty complex) Rumi3 machine featuring a mix of Virtex-5 and Virtex-6 FPGAs. Rumi3 was made for FPGA emulation of some mobile chipset.

Too bad, all that high-end stuff rarely gets spotted by any public reviewers or bloggers.

[mac.6]

FPGA emulation is pretty common, but in my company we tend to switch to Synopsys HAPS fpga server or Zebu emulation machines.
So I have a heap of fpga boards gathering dust (mostly altera, some Xilinx). Most unusable since they require licenses.

[rzsn]

So are these boards for sale, I would be interested!

[james_s]

The OP was last active here 3.5 years ago so even if the boards are still in their possession it's unlikely they will ever see your message.