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Comparison of 7 Series FPGA boards for PCIe

March 12, 20142 minutes

Comparison of 7 Series FPGA boards for PCIe

One of my most common customer requests is to speed up execution of a software application using FPGA hardware acceleration. If the application runs on a PC or server, you can achieve impressive performance gains by using off-the-shelf FPGA development boards for PCI Express.

Here is a comparison of the available 7 Series FPGA boards for PCI Express applications:

AC701 Artix-7KC705 Kintex-7VC707 Virtex-7VC709 Virtex-7
$1295$1695$3495$4995
XC7A200T-2FBG676CXC7K325T-2FFG900CXC7VX485T-2FFG1761XC7VX690T-2FFG1761C
4-lane Gen2 PCIe8-lane Gen2 PCIe8-lane Gen2 PCIe8-lane Gen3 PCIe
1GB DDR3 SODIMM1GB DDR3 SODIMM1GB DDR3 SODIMM4GB DDR3 SODIMM x2
8Kb EEPROM8Kb EEPROM8Kb EEPROM1KB EEPROM
No BPI Flash128MB BPI Flash128MB BPI Flash32MB BPI Flash
32MB Quad SPI16MB Quad SPI16MB Quad SPINo Quad SPI Flash
SD Card slotSD Card slotSD Card slotNo SD
No LPC FMC1x LPC FMCNo LPC FMCNo LPC FMC
1x HPC FMC (*)1x HPC FMC (*)2 x HPC FMC1x HPC FMC (*)
1x SFP1x SFP+1x SFP+4x SFP/SFP+
1GB Ethernet1GB Ethernet1Gb EthernetNo Ethernet
No USBNo USBNo USBNo USB
UART over USBUART over USBUART over USBUART over USB
HDMI outHDMI outHDMI outNo Video
XADC headerXADC headerAMS portNo Analog
  • (*) Note: These HPC FMC connectors are only partially populated which means that they wont be able to support all standard FMCs.
  • There are many more FPGA boards for PCIe on the market, but I chose to limit the comparison to those that are more strongly supported by Xilinx.

The reason these types of boards are so useful in the hardware acceleration space is because PCI Express is the highest bandwidth, lowest latency link that you can have between a PC’s CPU and an external FPGA. There’s no use shipping off work to an FPGA if the time it takes the data to get there and back is more than the time saved through improved processing efficiency.

For companies looking at creating their own FPGA based hardware acceleration solution (or any FPGA solution for that matter), my advice is always to first prove that the concept works using off-the-shelf hardware before designing your own custom board. I develop FPGA based hardware acceleration solutions for companies around the world, in applications such as data mining, network security, high frequency trading and more. If you have an application that you would like to speed up using FPGA hardware acceleration, I can help.