Fun or no fun with Cyclone V Integrated ARM processors?

Hi Joe,

I recently got one of the Cyclone V SoC boards (First the Helio kit, then the LCD to make it a "Helio View"): http://www.macnica-na.com/web/americas/heliokit

Here's what I found.. from a tools perspective, if you're used to microcontrollers (like PICs, etc.) there's a definite learning curve because you pretty much don't want to run the SoC without an operating system. That said, if you're used to writing Linux/embedded Linux, the whole toolchain and debuggers are there. Because there's an OS, you have to play a few games to directly access peripherals that you build in the FPGA fabric because the addresses are obscured (you can get around this pretty easily and expose the physical address space if you don't want to write drivers).

Based on my experience with the kit (it has both HDMI in/out and an 800x480 LCD), unless you're doing really high-end, high resolution graphics, the dual A9 has plenty of horsepower. The demo set that comes with the Helio View (uses DirectFB, which is basically a thin library that allows you to render graphics) shows this pretty well. I'm actually working on integrating it with some of the Video IP suite to do on-screen display over processed video, and the VIP suite does all the heavy lifting for the video while the A9 does the graphics rendering (with the benefit of Linux). Looked at the I.MX for this sort of thing, too, but since I'm more used to the intuitive flow of the VIP suite, I went FPGA. The A9 really helps vs. NIOS (embedded processor) because it has the horsepower to get the graphics rendering done.