Hi ej
yeah same with mpsoc etc /axi/amb connectors.
anyway, so far, so good with Efinix.
WHat can it do for me ? Well currently I seek to deal with the heat. it costs fancy metalwork to deal with the heat, and the completed Efinix design *will likely * be lower power, according to power estimator. about half !
Still, what you pay for with Xilinx is the absolute benchmark superb quality of the documentation, tools and logicores. Unbeatable. (disclaimer I am a Xilinx alliance partner)
Efinix device are low comparative cost, and the tool chain is improving quite quickly. and they seem to listen.
It will take me a little while to go to being efficient and effective with high level language design which I will need on the Efinix. Fortunately, gates are cheap. How is it for getting timing closure on a external 64 lane wide 1200 Msps LVDS bus, I dunno yet.
I used to use Microblaze alot. Then I got used to having an A53 core (admittidly running down at 600 megs) and 16 bits of DDR4 attached (600 meg clock) for an otherwise 2 Mbyte requirement.... and being rather haphazard with code efficiency, rooms for giant deug buffers, whole of program updating, etc (I use FreeRTOS+TCP) and having the neon cores if I wanted them- IE that much horsepower in hand gives me upgrade proof capability. At a heat and complexity cost. The MPSoC is a complex beast- not to be underestimated whatever your skill.
Technique on the efinix will be more high level synthesised cores, and custom instructions on the 200 meg Sapphire RISC-V and 32 MB of HyperRAM. (200 megs is about what it will do with complex configuration) .
My feeling is that I am abotu a year ahead from where I really want the Efinix toolchain to be in terms of performance/stability. But if you dont use it and dont push them, it will not advance...
![Efinix 1648454-0](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=220950.0;attach=1648457;image)