New Efinix FPGA family - Topaz

[glenenglish]

https://www.efinixinc.com/products-topaz.html

https://www.efinixinc.com/docs/topaz-overview-v1.0.pdf


well that is hot on the heels of Titanium - (the 1GHz fabric)

Just when I was whining a bit to Efinix that their Ti375 SoC was just too big and too pricey for alot of designs, we get something in mid range with SoC and transceivers . interesting !

The documentation hints they have tweaked the routing to increase utilization and Fmax.

[AndyC_772]

Interesting, but not what I was hoping for.

I switched from Altera Cyclone IV to Trion when Intel basically made the chips unavailable a couple of years ago. The way they handled the supply chain issue was unforgivable, IMHO.

Trion is cheaper and readily available, so that got me out of a hole. I've put a lot of work into porting my designs.

However, in terms of fmax, Cyclone IV is still faster despite being so much older. That wasn't what I expected, and it has caused me a few issues.

I'd have liked to see a 'Trion plus' range - higher performance and with a broader range of smaller packages, maybe a QFP64. Something that will fit an inexpensive PCB and not be the chip that defines the design rules for the whole board.

[asmi]

Do these things actually exist, or they were just announced? I would love to get my hands on parts with RV hardcores. Also I like that they support LPDDR4 instead of regular DDR4 - the former is easier to route.
Do they have any devboards available?

[glenenglish]

I'll have lots of questions for my Efinix factory interface today ! for sure.

ASMI - of course you can buy Ti375 off the shelf (with the hard core) , but its way too big for alot of users. By Q1 2025 you wiill be able to get the Ti165- (half a Ti375 with quad core) .

I will be asking today when the Tv075 will hit the shelves- smallest FPGA with quadcore in tweaked family (same titanium logic)

Andy_C - of course , Efinix Titanium runs rings around Cyclone IV.....( I used Titanium when I couldnt buy Spartan 7 during covid) The multipliers and block rams will run at 1000 MHz, I have verified this- actually 1070 MHz... however the routing through all the LEs slows designs down without lots of registers. RISCV without FP will run at 350 MHz, slowest silicon ...... pretty good. The very tight timing for the FPU (lots of logic levels) slows it to ~ 230 MHz (slowest silicon)

I think you will find QFP FPGAs will disappear altogether.  That's a thing of the past, now. There is no future business with QFP.. BGA is very reliable, much more so than QFN which has stress issues with temperature cycling. Efinix now have in Ti60 size a 0.8mm 256 BGA which is easy to work with. You dont need under-board caps either

[SiliconWizard]

Looks interesting for sure - wonder about the Fmax for the RISC-V cores? And of course, cost?

[glenenglish]

I dunno about topaz
but RISC-V quad hard cores which are  (already) in Titanium Ti375/Ti165 run at 1 GHz
and it is the same 16nm. My guess is it will be 700-1000 MHz for Topaz.
 
The quad hard cores in Titanium support custom instruction, also, which is a huge advantage with fpga fabric next door....
I expect, because Efinix like to minimize the number of mask sets, that  it is the same core
I half -think that TOpaz is lower spec silicon than Titanium. maybe 30% slower- so my guess is 700 MHz hard cores and 700 MHz multipliers..... maybe they're just low spec Titanium (same mask set)  and binned for Topaz. The "extra routing resources" could be just that they're using the same large mask sets and disabling the use of the many of the LEs  to be purely routing.

[asmi]

ASMI - of course you can buy Ti375 off the shelf (with the hard core) , but its way too big for alot of users. By Q1 2025 you wiill be able to get the Ti165- (half a Ti375 with quad core) .

I will be asking today when the Tv075 will hit the shelves- smallest FPGA with quadcore in tweaked family (same titanium logic)

I've read up on them and it looks like those hard cores are RV32 That reduces my interest to zero. Which is a shame. I almost bought a devboard. I wonder what kind of <censored> thought that adding hardened 32 bit CPU is a great idea in year 2024. Oh well, I guess I will have to wait for someone more sane to come up with Zynq-style SoC with 64 bit RV cores.

[glenenglish]

why do you need RV64 on an embedded machine, especially when you have custom instructions for accelerators in fabric?
Zynq is still the biggest selling SoC of all time by more than 100  : 1, (yes true)  and its a old pair of 32 bit A9 cores,. (But A9 is a strong OoO core )
and it is still selling like that. Xilinx put the price up 30%, and sales didnt change....which shows its a demand product.

[glenenglish]

anyway, enough !
This thread is about Topaz, not why you need RV64 for embedded projects ! :-)

[asmi]

why do you need RV64 on an embedded machine, especially when you have custom instructions for accelerators in fabric?

Because I need more address space than 4G. And custom instructions do absolutely nothing to alleviate this problem.

Zynq is still the biggest selling SoC of all time by more than 100  : 1, (yes true)  and its a old pair of 32 bit A9 cores,. (But A9 is a strong OoO core )
and it is still selling like that. Xilinx put the price up 30%, and sales didnt change....which shows its a demand product.

That's because their MPSoC is too expensive to migrate to, otherwise I would've done that a long time ago.

[asmi]

anyway, enough !
This thread is about Topaz, not why you need RV64 for embedded projects ! :-)

This is actually a relevant discussion, especially considering that these chips will presumably be around for a while, and so they will need to be relevant not just now, but in 5 or even 10 years from now. I think it's a serious mistake on their part to only include 32 bit cores. There is a reason all Linux-capable RV SoCs I've ever seen are 64 bit ones.

[glenenglish]

What do you mean by too expensive, what are you paying for MPSoC ZU1CG ? I think must less than  USD100 is pretty good  (in volume) . Fantastic value for money considering what it has on board including a pair of lockstep R5s

Street zynq 32 bit SoC prices (7010 are $25-$35)  . smallest polarfire-SoC $36-$45.

[asmi]

What do you mean by too expensive, what are you paying for MPSoC ZU1CG, ZU2CG? I think USD85 is pretty good !

I have no idea where you get them for that price, the lowest 2CG that I can actually buy (XCZU2CG-1SBVA484I) is 518.34 CAD ~ 375 USD. This price is ridiculous.

[glenenglish]

I've PMed you. Expect between 3:1 and 10:1 price reduction in volume on FPGAs......

EFINIX though will give you a good price on any volume, 1 pcs or a tray.  So will Altera-----
But best step is buying a full tray, which is not that many for a 400 ball part (84 pcs) .

Efinix is probably best value for money right now- fast silicon, and  the tools are OK.

Lattice (AVant E) , Altera (Agilex 5)  , Microchip (polarfire-2)  will all have new devices shipping in volume by year end.....  so the low-mid range FPGA world will get a good boost

[glenenglish]

What do you mean by too expensive, what are you paying for MPSoC ZU1CG, ZU2CG? I think USD85 is pretty good !

I have no idea where you get them for that price, the lowest 2CG that I can actually buy (XCZU2CG-1SBVA484I) is 518.34 CAD ~ 375 USD. This price is ridiculous.

It is how a manufacturers like MYIR with their ZU3 SoM can sell the whole ZU3 SoM (with 64 bit DDR)  for like USD250-USD300 !

[asmi]

I've PMed you. Expect between 3:1 and 10:1 reduction in volume on FPGAs......

Thanks for the info. I don't have such volumes at the moment as most of my projects are straight FPGAs, I only recently started using Zynqs. Actually that was when I realized just how limiting 32 bit CPUs are - if you need a PCIE root complex, you will need an address "hole" so that you can map PCIE devices memory to, and Zynq-015 only has 2 GBytes of it - and even that is split across two AXI ports, so your PCIE can access 1G addresses at most.

If we get back to the topic, you can connect more LPDDR4 memory than 4G, so where all other MMIO is going to go? You will either have to invent banking to access all that DRAM (hello 80s again!), or come up with some screwy way to access MM devices. Either approach sucks.

[glenenglish]

I guess horses for courses. None of my stuff needs any more than 128-256 MB. all low latency SDR which means buffers are minimal.
if you need > 4 Gbytes, your use cases are very different to mine.

ZYNQ 7015 is really barely competitive with ZU1CG. 7007 and 7010 have sweets spots at the low end of the market.
Polarfire SoC   in 025T would seem to be your best option. $44 in small quantity, and 400 MHz multipliers.

[asmi]

I guess horses for courses. None of my stuff needs any more than 128-256 MB. all low latency SDR which means buffers are minimal.
if you need > 4 Gbytes, your use cases are very different to mine.

Are you sure that in the next 10 years you will never require more than 2GB of RAM (that's the realistic max for 32 bit systems, as the rest is going to be required for MMIO)?

ZYNQ 7015 is really barely competitive with ZU1CG. 7007 and 7010 have sweets spots at the low end of the market.

7015 has a quad of MGTs, which is it's greatest advantage. PCIE opens many doors for system designers, as you can add PCIE controllers of just about any modern bus.