05/03/06 - Acceptable devices ahoy!

today, working in trees lab, I saw that oswaldo had a load of devices that would suit us out.
They are: a liddle device with a Vertex 4, flash, and ethernet, on a 3cm by 6cm board.
The board has busses either side for connection.
This would basicly suit our purposes, although its a bit hefty, and has a cost of about £100 a node.
Hopefuly we could get the cost down to 15 or 20.
Plus ours would be smaller.

so basicly we have a protype platform acceptable for final delivery, which is frankly excesive to our needs (32 bit bus, vertex 4 FPGA capable of holding about 100 proccesssors, etc).

Yay. With this, assuming no hickups on the FPGA front, I see no reasonable objection to using FPGAs. Further, although they are hard to get hold of there is a bigger 5000 slice core for the package we want, which would be another way of removing the fpga capacity issue.

Anyway, I'm looking into specifics but we now know with certainty that the project as outlined is totaly viable.