Do anyone here know what kind of "classic pc" performance one is likely to get out of a board like that? Could you get on the order of low-end pc (~500 dollar soc / netbook with real gigabit ethernet, sata6 and usb3) from something like that, if paired up with a reasonable cpu design?
The $3500 board is a lot, yes. There is also a $99 "Arty" board that is enough to run what is in the HiFive1, and I think even to add an MMU and run Linux. The $3500 one has enough space to do multiple cores, FPU and so forth as well.
Both the $99 and $3500 FPGA boards run a Rocket CPU at 65 MHz, which is pretty slow, though faster than you get with a software cycle-accurate simulator on a workstation.
https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/
today, is a dev board
https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/
that costs around 3500 USD:
https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-k...
Do anyone here know what kind of "classic pc" performance one is likely to get out of a board like that? Could you get on the order of low-end pc (~500 dollar soc / netbook with real gigabit ethernet, sata6 and usb3) from something like that, if paired up with a reasonable cpu design?