Amazon EC2 F1 is a compute instance with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that you can program to create custom hardware accelerations for your application. F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code, including an FPGA Developer AMI and Hardware Developer Kit (HDK). Once your FPGA design is complete, you can register it as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and deploy it to your F1 instance in just a few clicks. You can reuse your AFIs as many times, and across as many F1 instances as you like.
Amazon EC2 F1 instances are currently in preview in two different instance sizes that include up to eight FPGAs per instance. F1 instances include the latest 16 nm Xilinx UltraScale Plus FPGA. Each FPGA includes local 64 GiB DDR4 ECC protected memory, with a dedicated PCIe x16 connection. Each FPGA contains approximately 2.5 million logic elements and approximately 6,800 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) engines. Just like other Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances, you pay for F1 compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments or upfront payments. There is no charge for the FPGA Developer AMI or HDK, and you can program the FPGA on your F1 instance as many times as you like with no additional fees.
The description does say “F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code, including an FPGA Developer AMI and Hardware Developer Kit (HDK).” I would tend to imagine that I would not need to use Vivado, but just their tools. We’ll have to wait and find out if I get approved for the trial run.
Put my app in even though I’ve barely played with that FPGA at home. If nothing else I can get more learning in and maybe think of how I can make use of it.
Wonder how many bitcoin generators are going to sign up
