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you might be getting ripped off if you're paying $1500 for a Spartan-3 board.

I guess they don't really have the board volume to get low prices. But If you want a graphics card for $1500 that's probably less functional than an NVidia commodity card, I'm not gonna stop you.

OTOH, If you're interested in FPGA programming and a novice at it, you'll want to get a MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper Spartan board (like 50 to 150). See http://digilentinc.com/ for good starter boards.
If you're serious about FPGA programming (or just willing to pay $1500 to $3000) you will definitely want to get a board with a Virtex or Stratix on board:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML501-UNI-G.htm

If you want to have it on PCIx:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML555-G.htm

You can also get FPGAs socketted for AMD's Hypertransport bus and Intel's FSB:
http://xtremedatainc.com/ (Altera FPGAs)
http://drccomputer.com/ (Xilinx FPGAs)
http://nallatech.com/
http://celoxica.com/

(some of these vendors also sell PCI solutions)

FPGA programming environments still mostly suck. it's a market impeded by proprietary standards and a whole lot of NP-Hard algorithms. We're working on it...

These things already exist. You can buy PCI plug-in modules from Nallatech (http://www.nallatech.com/). Complete systems are also available from SGI (http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_re leases/2005/september/rasc.html).

From what I understand, it is still very hard to program these things, but software techonology is starting to catch up. SGI has a version of GDB which is FPGA aware.

Ah, the fame and fortune...

As a software design engineer at Nallatech, I'm pretty chuffed we came up on Slashdot.
Not wanting to come across as a pedant...

"software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware"
This is not the case, with Nallatech's software is capable of providing the intercommunication (DIMEtalk), the low level control (FUSE) and the Algorithm implementation (double and single precision floating point cores, as well as a new tool, currently in beta, to simplify their use by developers).

"Nallatech, a company that makes software tools for FPGA programmers".
This is true, however we do equal amount of hardware and firmware development.

More info:
Read our white paper about supercomputing for the oil and gas industry, reg required I'm afraid?
The foot print of this thing could be tiny, as you can get 9 Virtex 2 pro FPGAs (Using BenBLUE-3 modules) on a BenERA Carrier card, and you can get 4 BenERAs into a cPCI rack, so to get 64 FPGAs you just need 2 standard cPCI racks. Since you can get 4 cPCI racks into you standard 19" server rack, which would kick out a massive 2 Teraflops.

Though, I can't help but think Cell processors might kick our asses, at least a little bit anyway. Sorry about all the links to Nallatech, just pointing folk to the info. Oh, by the way, I think the 1 Teraflop for 64 FPGAs is a very conservative estimate.

Ah, the fame and fortune...

As a software design engineer at Nallatech, I'm pretty chuffed we came up on Slashdot.
Not wanting to come across as a pedant...

"software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware"
This is not the case, with Nallatech's software is capable of providing the intercommunication (DIMEtalk), the low level control (FUSE) and the Algorithm implementation (double and single precision floating point cores, as well as a new tool, currently in beta, to simplify their use by developers).

"Nallatech, a company that makes software tools for FPGA programmers".
This is true, however we do equal amount of hardware and firmware development.

More info:
Read our white paper about supercomputing for the oil and gas industry, reg required I'm afraid?
The foot print of this thing could be tiny, as you can get 9 Virtex 2 pro FPGAs (Using BenBLUE-3 modules) on a BenERA Carrier card, and you can get 4 BenERAs into a cPCI rack, so to get 64 FPGAs you just need 2 standard cPCI racks. Since you can get 4 cPCI racks into you standard 19" server rack, which would kick out a massive 2 Teraflops.

Though, I can't help but think Cell processors might kick our asses, at least a little bit anyway. Sorry about all the links to Nallatech, just pointing folk to the info. Oh, by the way, I think the 1 Teraflop for 64 FPGAs is a very conservative estimate.

Ah, the fame and fortune...

As a software design engineer at Nallatech, I'm pretty chuffed we came up on Slashdot.
Not wanting to come across as a pedant...

"software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware"
This is not the case, with Nallatech's software is capable of providing the intercommunication (DIMEtalk), the low level control (FUSE) and the Algorithm implementation (double and single precision floating point cores, as well as a new tool, currently in beta, to simplify their use by developers).

"Nallatech, a company that makes software tools for FPGA programmers".
This is true, however we do equal amount of hardware and firmware development.

More info:
Read our white paper about supercomputing for the oil and gas industry, reg required I'm afraid?
The foot print of this thing could be tiny, as you can get 9 Virtex 2 pro FPGAs (Using BenBLUE-3 modules) on a BenERA Carrier card, and you can get 4 BenERAs into a cPCI rack, so to get 64 FPGAs you just need 2 standard cPCI racks. Since you can get 4 cPCI racks into you standard 19" server rack, which would kick out a massive 2 Teraflops.

Though, I can't help but think Cell processors might kick our asses, at least a little bit anyway. Sorry about all the links to Nallatech, just pointing folk to the info. Oh, by the way, I think the 1 Teraflop for 64 FPGAs is a very conservative estimate.

Ah, the fame and fortune...

As a software design engineer at Nallatech, I'm pretty chuffed we came up on Slashdot.
Not wanting to come across as a pedant...

"software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware"
This is not the case, with Nallatech's software is capable of providing the intercommunication (DIMEtalk), the low level control (FUSE) and the Algorithm implementation (double and single precision floating point cores, as well as a new tool, currently in beta, to simplify their use by developers).

"Nallatech, a company that makes software tools for FPGA programmers".
This is true, however we do equal amount of hardware and firmware development.

More info:
Read our white paper about supercomputing for the oil and gas industry, reg required I'm afraid?
The foot print of this thing could be tiny, as you can get 9 Virtex 2 pro FPGAs (Using BenBLUE-3 modules) on a BenERA Carrier card, and you can get 4 BenERAs into a cPCI rack, so to get 64 FPGAs you just need 2 standard cPCI racks. Since you can get 4 cPCI racks into you standard 19" server rack, which would kick out a massive 2 Teraflops.

Though, I can't help but think Cell processors might kick our asses, at least a little bit anyway. Sorry about all the links to Nallatech, just pointing folk to the info. Oh, by the way, I think the 1 Teraflop for 64 FPGAs is a very conservative estimate.

Ah, the fame and fortune...

As a software design engineer at Nallatech, I'm pretty chuffed we came up on Slashdot.
Not wanting to come across as a pedant...

"software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware"
This is not the case, with Nallatech's software is capable of providing the intercommunication (DIMEtalk), the low level control (FUSE) and the Algorithm implementation (double and single precision floating point cores, as well as a new tool, currently in beta, to simplify their use by developers).

"Nallatech, a company that makes software tools for FPGA programmers".
This is true, however we do equal amount of hardware and firmware development.

More info:
Read our white paper about supercomputing for the oil and gas industry, reg required I'm afraid?
The foot print of this thing could be tiny, as you can get 9 Virtex 2 pro FPGAs (Using BenBLUE-3 modules) on a BenERA Carrier card, and you can get 4 BenERAs into a cPCI rack, so to get 64 FPGAs you just need 2 standard cPCI racks. Since you can get 4 cPCI racks into you standard 19" server rack, which would kick out a massive 2 Teraflops.

Though, I can't help but think Cell processors might kick our asses, at least a little bit anyway. Sorry about all the links to Nallatech, just pointing folk to the info. Oh, by the way, I think the 1 Teraflop for 64 FPGAs is a very conservative estimate.

Ah, the fame and fortune...

As a software design engineer at Nallatech, I'm pretty chuffed we came up on Slashdot.
Not wanting to come across as a pedant...

"software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware"
This is not the case, with Nallatech's software is capable of providing the intercommunication (DIMEtalk), the low level control (FUSE) and the Algorithm implementation (double and single precision floating point cores, as well as a new tool, currently in beta, to simplify their use by developers).

"Nallatech, a company that makes software tools for FPGA programmers".
This is true, however we do equal amount of hardware and firmware development.

More info:
Read our white paper about supercomputing for the oil and gas industry, reg required I'm afraid?
The foot print of this thing could be tiny, as you can get 9 Virtex 2 pro FPGAs (Using BenBLUE-3 modules) on a BenERA Carrier card, and you can get 4 BenERAs into a cPCI rack, so to get 64 FPGAs you just need 2 standard cPCI racks. Since you can get 4 cPCI racks into you standard 19" server rack, which would kick out a massive 2 Teraflops.

Though, I can't help but think Cell processors might kick our asses, at least a little bit anyway. Sorry about all the links to Nallatech, just pointing folk to the info. Oh, by the way, I think the 1 Teraflop for 64 FPGAs is a very conservative estimate.

Ah, the fame and fortune...

As a software design engineer at Nallatech, I'm pretty chuffed we came up on Slashdot.
Not wanting to come across as a pedant...

"software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware"
This is not the case, with Nallatech's software is capable of providing the intercommunication (DIMEtalk), the low level control (FUSE) and the Algorithm implementation (double and single precision floating point cores, as well as a new tool, currently in beta, to simplify their use by developers).

"Nallatech, a company that makes software tools for FPGA programmers".
This is true, however we do equal amount of hardware and firmware development.

More info:
Read our white paper about supercomputing for the oil and gas industry, reg required I'm afraid?
The foot print of this thing could be tiny, as you can get 9 Virtex 2 pro FPGAs (Using BenBLUE-3 modules) on a BenERA Carrier card, and you can get 4 BenERAs into a cPCI rack, so to get 64 FPGAs you just need 2 standard cPCI racks. Since you can get 4 cPCI racks into you standard 19" server rack, which would kick out a massive 2 Teraflops.

Though, I can't help but think Cell processors might kick our asses, at least a little bit anyway. Sorry about all the links to Nallatech, just pointing folk to the info. Oh, by the way, I think the 1 Teraflop for 64 FPGAs is a very conservative estimate.

Meanwhile FPGAs have displaced DSPs, FFTs and are overtaking CPUs for embedded applications. There are even rumblesof FPGAs seriously impacting the HPC market. Times are a changin so I'm not surprised to see traditional CPU-based CS research being downsized in response to this paradigm shift. Perhaps we need to take VIVA seriously just as Cray, SGI, Starbridge Systems, SRC, Nallatech and others are doing.

Where i work our dream softie is someone with a ComSci and an ElecEng degree, though we do more embeded software. I recon ComSci and pure maths would be a good one for high brow software ;) or an ComSci and MBA for business systems.

Here is an ADC (dual actually) and an FPGA to do the decoding for you :-) you still need to mix down the 2.4 GHz but that is pretty easy and inexpensive - this one is fast enough that if you were nuts enough you could create your own software radio with it (its a nice card with good VHDL support)
Benadda dual AD DA card
And I agree with you it is a cool idea !

They once made a machine out of FPGA's. It worked by evolution: It would rearange different FPGA's and work out which gave the correct answer the quickest, and learn from there. Basically, it was pretty slow the first time it tried something. But if you let it learn for a while, you got supercomputer performances out of a tower-sized box (On the specific set of tasks it has learned, anyways).

Its good for plenty of fixed-task things: Medical imaging, software-defined DSP, scientific computing, that sort of thing. You can check them out here

Has anyone seen any IP cores for chess? couldn't find any on opencores. It'd be great to put these designs on some real kickass hardware, like a Nallatech system, we use a BenNUEY board with 3 BenBLUE2 daughter boards a total of 32000000 gates for our AES stuff