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http://avnetexpress.avnet.com/...

$306. I don't know if that is wholesale or what.

>He is fascinated that people can create chips to modify existing hardware.

Hook him up with some digital logic and HDL tutorials and get him a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA LX9 MicroBoard. It's a basic FPGA dev board the size of a USB stick and (relatively) inexpensive.

There are also USB stick microcontroller dev kits like the TI ez430 that he'd also probably have fun with as well.

"Xilinx XC3S50A" : of course, that's the very low-end line-of-product from Xilinx. Additionally, Spartan 3 is an old generation.

On the other hand, check the price of large, high-speed FPGA from Xilinx's Virtex 6 family : nothing below $1000. Top at $10000.
Ouch.

http://avnetexpress.avnet.com/store/em/EMController/Programmable-Logic/FPGA/_/N-4294649145%204294609580%20100235?Nn=25&action=products&cat=1&catalogId=500201&cutTape=&inStock=&langId=-1&myCatalog=&proto=&regionalStock=&rohs=&storeId=500201&term=&topSellers=

IMHO, Tabula is targeting the market of large, high-performance, FPGA matrices.

you'll want >=8x PCIe since most interesting applications (especially those that distributed computing is worst at) are IO bound.

problem: FPGA parts big enough to have PCIe and DDR interfaces and still do interesting stuff with are expensive on their own @ $600

http://avnetexpress.avnet.com/store/em/EMController/FPGA/Xilinx/XC5VLX50T-1FF1136C/_/R-4696910/A-4696910/An-0?action=part&catalogId=500201&langId=-1&storeId=500201&listIndex=-1

http://www.em.avnet.com/evk/home/0,1707,RID%253D0%2526CID%253D37133%2526CCD%253DUSA%2526SID%253D32214%2526DID%253DDF2%2526LID%253D32232%2526PRT%253D0%2526PVW%253D%2526BID%253DDF2%2526CTP%253DEVK,00.html

$1100 for the board is as cheap as i've seen yet.

you'll want >=8x PCIe since most interesting applications (especially those that distributed computing is worst at) are IO bound.

problem: FPGA parts big enough to have PCIe and DDR interfaces and still do interesting stuff with are expensive on their own @ $600

http://avnetexpress.avnet.com/store/em/EMController/FPGA/Xilinx/XC5VLX50T-1FF1136C/_/R-4696910/A-4696910/An-0?action=part&catalogId=500201&langId=-1&storeId=500201&listIndex=-1

http://www.em.avnet.com/evk/home/0,1707,RID%253D0%2526CID%253D37133%2526CCD%253DUSA%2526SID%253D32214%2526DID%253DDF2%2526LID%253D32232%2526PRT%253D0%2526PVW%253D%2526BID%253DDF2%2526CTP%253DEVK,00.html

$1100 for the board is as cheap as i've seen yet.

so why is "helping them migrate" not an option?

Let me put things into perspective. I'm a developer working for a small company, less than 20 employees. Several of our clients have tens to hundreds of thousands of employees. These include organizations like Choice Hotels, Avnet, and the US Air Force. Now, you expect me, one of two developers at a small company, to approach a client like Avnet or the Air Force, and try to dictate IT policy to them? Like they don't have an IT staff who already knows everything I might tell them? Avnet is a technology company! Like I said, these people are aware of their problems, they understand the security implications and they understand the development difficulties. I'm sure that all of them have migration away from IE on their schedules, but I'm not going to refuse to write quality software for them just because they have a deficient browser.

If you feel so strongly about this, then perhaps you can contact Choice, Avnet, and the Air Force and let them know that you think they should migrate away from IE. I'm sure they'll value your opinion.

Indeed, that is exactly the point. Use this device to embed a web server in a larger device.

Here is another device that can serve web pages but is arguably even more useful (and it is smaller). Instead of a PIC, it's a Virtex 4 FPGA with integrated PowerPC core. Obviously it runs Linux, but more importantly, you can put extra hardware in the FPGA, connecting Linux software to whatever other hardware you wish to use. This is very flexible, since you probably won't need any other electronics to make your embedded system.

A good friend of mine is a professional photographer and he's currently suing Avnet for more then liberal use of his copyrighted images which they didn't want to pay him for the use rights of. When he had discovered the first image, he called me and I told him he could get more info about how and when they had used his images from the wayback machine. He and his lawyer started combing it and came up with tons of exaples and showed them exactly when and how is images had been used by avnet. The case has been going on for two years and so far avnet is not looking so well.
After they filed suit, Avnet's archives disappeared from the wayback machine, but it doesn't matter because they have hard copies of everything.
Why would this stuff disappear?

Avnet publishes *some* prices. Note that large runs are quite a bit less expensive. IIRC, Xilnix claims something like $5 per Spartan chip for runs of more than 250,000. I forget what their claims are for their large Vertex chip runs.

Spartan 3 pricing
Virtex 4 pricing

Avnet publishes *some* prices. Note that large runs are quite a bit less expensive. IIRC, Xilnix claims something like $5 per Spartan chip for runs of more than 250,000. I forget what their claims are for their large Vertex chip runs.

Spartan 3 pricing
Virtex 4 pricing

Works just fine:

Based on their current work plan, an FPGA-based project board will be available in November "that serves as the development platform for a much less expensive ASIC-based solution (second quarter of 2006), contingent on available funding."

I don't know if they've been paying any attention (I presume they have), but FPGAs have gotten extremely cheap as of late. AVNet lists the Xilinx XC3S200-4VQ100C with the following rates:

1 - $14.7950
25 - $12.8700
100+ - $11.2200

While I don't like assuming, in this case it's fairly safe to say that the price would be even lower for quantities of 1000 or more. I see little difficulty with them being able to mass produce an FPGA card for ~$50 US. (Something of a sweet spot price point in computer the computer industry.) The only real reason I could see for going to ASICs is to reduce the cost of very large runs, and/or increasing the performance of the onboard chip.

If you want an FPGA with a PCI connector and a DB15 connector, look no further: http://www.em.avnet.com/evk/home/0,1719,RID%253D0% 2526CID%253D7816%2526CCD%253DUSA%2526SID%253D4746% 2526DID%253DDF2%2526SRT%253D1%2526LID%253D0%2526PV W%253D%2526BID%253DDF2%2526CTP%253DEVK,00.html

Yes, 1.5M gates should do it. The part is not easily available, though, but can be found given enough patience. Spartan FPGAs are intended to be low cost; if you compare to Virtex, especially -Pro, these will cost you hundreds of dollars.

I am suprised that no one has mentioned "The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act" which could be taken to forbid this kind of warrenty restriction.

True, Magnusson-Moss does prevent product tying as a condition of warranty. I can use aftermarket parts on a product had have the manufacturer honor the warranty if the aftermarket part didn't cause the failure.

HOWEVER, Magnussen-Moss does allow restrictions if such restrictions are provided to the consumer AT NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE. An example is if I buy a car, and the warranty requires scheduled labor at a specified garage, the scheduled labor has to be FREE OF CHARGE for the restrictions to be effective.

In AMD's case, their AMD, processor in a box package provides the heatsink and fan. They can indeed say: "You can only use this heatsink." in the warranty terms.