This is very awesome. Could you add some more thoughts on the tooling and the development workflow? Is it possible to target the Xilinx hardware using only open source (or AWS proprietary) tools? Or is Vivado still required for advanced stuff?
Vivado is required for all advanced features and programming Xilinx chips in general; like the sibling post said, there is no open FPGA toolchain implementation for Xilinx devices, especially for extremely high end ones like the ones being offered on the F1 (I expect they'd run at like, several thousand USD per device, on top of a several thousand dollar Vivado license for all the features).
It doesn't look like there's much AWS proprietary stuff here, though we'd have to wait for the SDK to be opened properly to be sure. I imagine it's mostly just making all of the stuff prepackaged and easily consumable for usage, and maybe some extra IP Cores or something for common stuff, and lots of examples. If you're already using Vivado I imagine using the F1/Cloud won't introduce any kind of major changes to what you expect.
> I expect they'd run at like, several thousand USD per device...
You're guessing about an order of magnitude too low, actually. The VU9P FPGAs Amazon is using cost between $30,000 and $55,000 each, depending on the speed grade.
Yes, this means a fully equipped F1 instance costs nearly half a million dollars. Don't count on the instances being cheap to run.
"This AMI includes a set of developer tools that you can use in the AWS Cloud at no charge. You write your FPGA code using VHDL or Verilog and then compile, simulate, and verify it using tools from the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite (you can also use third-party simulators, higher-level language compilers, graphical programming tools, and FPGA IP libraries)."
So basically, buying a copy of Vivado is the minimum. There aren't any open source tools that directly output Xilinx FPGA bitstreams that I know of.
It looks like the FPGA Developer AMI includes Vivado and a license explicitly for use on these platforms (look at the PuTTY screenshot in the blog post; it has a customized MOTD). You just need to set up the license server that Vivado will use and point it to the right license.
So I guess the real question is: what exactly is granted by the Vivado license on these AMIs? Do we get things like SDSoC, SDAccel, etc, and all the libraries? [1] The blog seems to imply you can program these things with OpenCL too (AKA SDAccel), so I'm guessing that these features are all enabled, but details about the included Vivado license in the AMI would be nice.
