Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorThanks all for your decent replies!
I appreciate you pointing to the pages wit the prices and to opencores.org. So for a more or less basic commercial control system, we have: QuartusII subscription: $3000 NiosII license: $500 --------- $3500 I still think amortizing the cost over the order volumes would make the thing more seamless. For example, in my company we would order about 2000 chips per year (we make medium size machines), and could easily pay an extra $1+ per. Whereas a high-volume manufacturer could just pay $0.10 extra. Yeah there's a penalty for stuff you don't use, but all other things being equal, this gets rid of all the hassle, saving precious hours for actual project development. The Xilinx FAE was here today and spent an hour showing us all the equivalent stuff, so we could compare. It seems their EDK with the microBlaze only cost $600 to license. I don't mean to sound like small potatoes here, but it's almost a 3k difference, although this is probably really being passed on to the chip cost; I still need to better compare equivalent chips. One thing they don't have is the visual schematic design like the Quartus', but their IDE has a wizard too that creates the VHDL snippets, which is not too bad. I love Altera :cry:, but for now it seems it's going to be Altera for my pet projects, and Xilinx for my work projects. Thanks all again! :)
