This post documents my quest for finding boards with high end FPGA devices and peripherals for reasonable prices.

Used SmartNICs

I started looking at accelerators and first generation SmartNICs. While these days they are typically outfitted with ARM CPUs colocated on the NIC, the first generation used FPGA chips as bump-in-the-wire.

Mellanox board with Xilinx Kintex UltraScale+

As I preferred to start with AMD (Xilinx) chips for their better open source toolchain support, I went to eBay and ordered some used Mellanox (nVidia) NICs such as the Innova-2 Flex: a $200 board fitted with DDR, PCIe, 40G ConnectX-5 NIC and a $6000 list price Kintex UltraScale+ FPGA chip. There was already a great amount of reverse engineering info so this looked very promising.

Sadly the ones I ordered were broken on arrival and they were hard to source, so I had to change plans.

Microsoft Azure boards

I started looking for alternatives in the Intel (Altera) space next. There wasn’t that much out there either until I stumbled on used Microsoft Azure FPGAs.

Apparently Microsoft has been placing boards with FPGAs in all Azure Datacenters servers for the last 10+ years as part of project Catapult. The use cases have advanced over the years, and early generation devices have entered the used market in the last couple of years.

Altera Stratix V

There are Pikes peak boards available that have an Altera Stratix V GS with 457K Logic Elements (LE), launched in 2010 on 28nm process, it has PCIe hard ip, 4GB DDR3 RAM and 2x 40GBe NICs. The great thing is these devices are going at $50 used. The challenge is finding out how to use them: the FPGA is an undocumented custom part and the pinout to the rest of the board and devices on them is undocumented as well. Fortunately there is a great series of blogs by people much smarter than me, like this one by Jan Marjanovic.

I found a Storey peak board that is same gen (v2) as Pikes Peak but in a more convenient PCIe form factor:

There is an entry in Jan’s series about that but it’s mainly focusing on the weird PCIe x8x8 setup.

Altera Arria 10

Project Catapult v3 Longs Peak comes with a generational improvement in the FPGA and other hardware. With a Altera Arria 10 FPGA with 1150K Logic Elements - launched in 2013 on a 28nm process it has hard memory controllers, DDR4 SDRAM, a dedicated Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx NIC, and additional OCuLink PCIe x8 connector.

See here for more details on this board.

I picked this up for $150 on eBay.

Altera Agilex?

Little is know about these Overlake/Celestial peak boards with codename A-2040. It’s likely an Agilex 7 (2019) on there, they are on eBay sometimes but still a bit too expensive at $700 for a gamble:

Also the red PCB in the timeline doesn’t match the green in the eBay boards, so who knows. I’ll probably pick one up when prices come down.

Used accelerator boards

Apart from SmartNICs, FPGAs have been used for other hardware accelerators which yield similar results.

Gidel Hawkeye Altera Arria 10

Originally used for screengrabbing, this PCIe board has an Arria 10 as well as DDR4 memory. Going for ~$100, I tested it.

New niche boards

There are some boards around allowing a devkit like experience with higher end FPGA at lower price points, or with high end (PCIe) interfaces.

QMTech Kintex-7 board

This one comes with DDR3 and a Raspberry Compute Module 4 socket+interface (sadly not PCIe) You can find it on AliExpress.

RHS Research NiteFury

With a Xilinx Artix-7 this is technically an entry level FPGA, but used on an interesting board as it sits on a M.2 format with PCIe 2.0 x2 interface. This can be bought from the RHS Research site or from Amazon.