Sparkfun: Alchitry board

I glanced at the $250 price tag, along with the tricky high density connectors and immediately dismissed it. But then I thought it would make an interesting comparison to the Zynq boards I get for $30.

First of all, it is only an FPGA, no dual ARM processor like the Zynq.

They sell (for $15) an board that breaks out the tricky connector to an array of 0.1 spaced holes you can solder to.

You get 206 IO pins. 112 on the top, 92 on the bottom.

It is supported by the free version of Vivado. The FPGA is a Xilinx Artix 7 -- XC7A100T-2FGG84I. I see just the chip selling for $218, so this isn't badly priced.

It has 215K logic cells, 13Mb of BRAM, 740 DSP slices.
Compare this to the Zynq I have, which is also an Arix-7, but with "only" 28K logic elements.