MiSTer FPGA Forum

Some interesting news from Terasic:

Terasic and Intel Deliver Cutting-Edge Platform for Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V to Accelerate Innovation in Open Computing

Hsinchu, Taiwan — August 30, 2022 — Terasic, a premier developer of Intel® FPGA platforms, is announcing today the availability of a new developer kit that will help accelerate innovation in open computing and transform the way SOC architects and system software developers define new products.

The Terasic Developer Kit for Intel® Pathfinder for RISC-V takes advantage of the powerful Intel® Cyclone® IV FPGA to allow a variety of RISC-V cores and other IP to be instantiated on a FPGA. The board is armed with 128MB SDRAM running exclusively for RISC-V cores, an on-board USB Blaster circuit for RISC-V debugging and FPGA programming, as well as a rich multimedia interface for advanced project development, making it an excellent platform to jump start performance-driven and mission critical applications.

Intel Pathfinder, together with the Terasic Developer Kit, offers an industry-first FPGA development kit with the ability to run industry leading operating systems and tool chains within a unified IDE. As a result, customers can achieve lower cost and higher performance in the project development phase.

"Terasic is honored to join forces with Intel to support the growth of the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. By combining Terasic’s best-in-class hardware design expertise with Intel’s compelling FPGA and software technologies, we look forward to accelerating the adoption of RISC-V, and creating a paradigm shift in the open-source ecosystem" , said Sean Peng, Founder and CEO of Terasic Inc.

"We are excited to see Terasic create a Developer Kit specifically for the Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V. We look forward to working with Terasic to drive the broad adoption of developer offerings that deliver powerful capabilities at affordable price points" , said Vijay Krishnan, General Manager, RISC-V Ventures, Intel Corporation.

Start your journey with the Terasic Developer Kit for Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V at https://pathfinder.intel.com

What are the specifications and price?

edit:

(Currency: USD)
$449
Academic: $410

Cyclone® IV EP4CE115

114,480 logic elements (LEs)
3,888 Embedded memory (Kbits)
266 Embedded 18 x 18 multipliers
4 General-purpose PLLs
528 User I/Os

Configuration Device and USB-Blaster Circuit

EPCS64 serial configuration device
On-board USB-Blaster circuitry
JTAG and AS mode configuration supported

Memory Devices

128MB (32Mx32bit) SDRAM
2MB (1Mx16) SRAM
8MB (4Mx16) Flash with 8-bit mode
32Kbit EEPROM

Switches and Indicators

18 switches and 4 push-buttons
18 red and 9 green LEDs
Eight 7-segment displays

Audio

24-bit encoder/decoder(CODEC)
line-in, line-out, and microphone-in jacks

Display

16x2 LCD module

On-Board Clocking Circuitry

Three 50MHz oscillator clock inputs
SMA connectors (external clock input/output)

SD Card Socket

Provides SPI and 4-bit SD mode for SD Card access

Two Gigabit Ethernet Ports

Integrated 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet
Supports Industrial Ethernet IP cores

172-pin High Speed Mezzanine Card (HSMC)

Configurable I/O standards (voltage levels: 3.3/2.5/1.8/1.5V)

USB Type A and B

Provide host and device controller compliant with USB 2.0
Support data transfer at full-speed and low-speed
PC driver available

40-pin Expansion Port

Configurable I/O standards (voltage levels: 3.3/2.5/1.8/1.5V)

VGA-out Connector

VGA DAC (high speed triple DACs)

DB-9 Serial Connector

RS232 port with flow control

PS/2 Connector

PS/2 connector for connecting a PS2 mouse or keyboard to the Developer Kit

Remote Control

Infrared receiver module

TV-in Connector

TV decoder (NTSC/PAL/SECAM)

Power

Desktop DC input
Switching and step-down regulators LM3150MH

https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page ... 2#contents

i got the email, no HDMI out on this is there though?

Uh, does this not have a HPS like the De-10 nano? That's a bit of a dealbreaker for this being a new MiSTer platform.

I apologize for my ignorance, but how much more powerful would this platform be compared to the MiSTer? It seems to only have 4,000 more LEs. Also, is it true that there's no HDMI? I'm not well versed on what makes a good FPGA gaming platform so what are your guy's thoughts?

I think that a PS3, Wii, Nintendo DS and Xbox 360, which are all cheap right now, covers most things up to modern consoles.

Extra gates should be directed at hardware addons and interfaces. Everything else is covered by the MiSTer.

KremlingKuthroat19 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 01, 2022 10:37 pm I apologize for my ignorance, but how much more powerful would this platform be compared to the MiSTer? It seems to only have 4,000 more LEs. Also, is it true that there's no HDMI? I'm not well versed on what makes a good FPGA gaming platform so what are your guy's thoughts?

It's not more powerful, but a different mix of features for different purposes. The built-in SDRAM and SRAM are nice; you won't need memory add-ons and the dual RAM will help more demanding cores. Many will like having DB9 and PS2 connectors for retro peripherals too. But the board still falls short critically by lacking HDMI and an ARM CPU to drive the framework. It also lacks the 1Gb of DDR RAM.

The CPU could be added externally, but it would need considerable MiSTer refactoring and sacrificing some pins of the single 40 pins expansion.
Adding HDMI would be more problematic as that needs licensing; a 3rd party/hobbyist add-on for HDMI would be unlikely to be made. Lastly, cores would need ot be rewritten to not use DDR-RAM, although that is less of an issue compared to the other two problems (many old systems don't need more than 128MB).

If you only care for VGA/15khz video then this board could be used (with say a RPi as CPU), but it wouldn't have as broad a reach as the DE-10.

Edit: the one possible advantage this board may have is to have faster memory bandwitdh (above the ~120Mhz MiSTer can handle) which *could* allow running more demanding cores where the DE10 just barely falls short. Maybe a NintendoDS core could run on this, but not sure what else could work.

KremlingKuthroat19 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 01, 2022 10:37 pm I apologize for my ignorance, but how much more powerful would this platform be compared to the MiSTer? It seems to only have 4,000 more LEs. Also, is it true that there's no HDMI? I'm not well versed on what makes a good FPGA gaming platform so what are your guy's thoughts?

Not an expert, but my read is that it's probably weaker. It only has 128M of RAM, and while it has some static RAM, there's only 2 megs of it, so it wouldn't help with much past the early 16-bit era.

You can probably port some of the Mister cores to it, but my read of the specs is that they're aiming it more at the set-top box market, or maybe for firewalling/routing, with the two network ports. But it's so expensive that I'm not sure that anyone would want it for that purpose.

Malor wrote: ↑Fri Sep 02, 2022 3:34 am

KremlingKuthroat19 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 01, 2022 10:37 pm I apologize for my ignorance, but how much more powerful would this platform be compared to the MiSTer? It seems to only have 4,000 more LEs. Also, is it true that there's no HDMI? I'm not well versed on what makes a good FPGA gaming platform so what are your guy's thoughts?

Not an expert, but my read is that it's probably weaker. It only has 128M of RAM, and while it has some static RAM, there's only 2 megs of it, so it wouldn't help with much past the early 16-bit era.

You can probably port some of the Mister cores to it, but my read of the specs is that they're aiming it more at the set-top box market, or maybe for firewalling/routing, with the two network ports. But it's so expensive that I'm not sure that anyone would want it for that purpose.

That's not what it's for at all. It's a RISC-V development board. You're intended to use it to evaluate various RISC-V cores (provided in the intel Pathfinder development environment) or to write/port software to RISC-V before you go to silicon. There's no intention this is to be turned into some sort of consumer device. (yes I know there was no intention for the de10 to be a mister either, but the inclusion of various network ports/multimedia io doesn't indicate targeting particular markets. It's just what they think is needed to develop for common RISC-V use cases)

Regardless, this isn't really anything relevant to MiSTer. A Cyclone IV from 2009 with no Arm HPS isn't going to be a 'mister'. You could frankenstien some RPi on it I guess but you gain nothing over a normal de10-nano, and probably still overall lose.