How Feasible Would It Be To Mate Pandora With FPGA?


If the fpga would be used I would suggest to have it simulate a component from a emulated system, so the instructions can be executed on real hardware. But to be useful you need a fast and feature rich fpga. Those are big, costly and use more power than dedicated gpu or cpu. Also someone needs to actually write the code to configure the fpga.


In the end I think it would invite some fpga fans to the pandora, even make more emulation possible, but it would not be efficient enough to add this feature for all users (as it would add _a lot_ of extra costs).


However, maybe someone knows if a super small and dirt cheap fpga exists that would be useful in some way? (hardware emulation)


For example the altera cyclone 2 ep2c20 uses about 100mwm can emulate x86, but prices start from $42+...


(http://zet.aluzina.org/index.php/Altera_DE1_Installation_guide)


(http://www.buyaltera.com/scripts/partsearch.dll/multisearch?site=ALTERA&lang=EN&keywords=EP2C20)
 
It would be cool to have like "second processor" modules for such, like the old BBC Micro "BEEB" did.  FPGA, parallelia, arrayforth, x86_64, MIPS, etc... :)   they did say it would be modular...!
 
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Given how much easier/more accurate this could make emulation by implementing sound chips (SPC, SID chip, and several other chips have already been implemented in FPGAs in the past) or GPUs (More specifically the VDPs in the NES, SNES, and Genesis), when not doing that it would be amazing! I could see some more intrepid homebrewers making DSPs and whatnot, for various tasks.
 
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I'm thinking PCB space is likely to be a problem.

Out of an FPGA and a second SDXC slot I know which one I'd prefer
 
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