Googling the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ it seems kinda expensive.
Of course plenty of hobbies let people spend thousands (or more) so there's nothing wrong with that if you've got the money. But is it the end target for your project? Or do you have ambitions to go beyond that?
Let's be clear here, this is a toy. Beyond being a fun project to work on that could maybe get my foot in the door were I ever to decide to change careers and move into hardware design, this is not going to change the GPU landscape or compete with any of the commercial players. What it might do is pave the way for others to do interesting things in this space. A board with all of the video hardware that you can plug into a computer with all the infrastructure available to play around with accelerating graphics could be a fun, if extremely niche, product. That would also require a *significant* time and money investment from me, and that's not something I necessarily want to deal with. When this is eventually open-sourced, those who really are interested could make their own boards.
One thing to note that is that while the US+ line is generally quite expensive (the higher end parts sit in the five-figures range for a one-off purchase! No one actually buying these is paying that price, but still!), the Kria SOMs are quite cheap in comparison. They've got a reasonably-powerful Zynq US+ for about $400, or just $350ish the dev boards (which do not expose some of the high-speed interfaces like PCIe). I'm starting to sound like a Xilinx shill given how many times I've re-stated this, but for anyone serious about getting into this kind of thing, those devboards are an amazing deal.
Yeah you're referring to the Linux kernel but software is much cheaper to design, test, build, scale and turn profitable than HW, especially GPUs.
Open source GPUs won't threat Nvidia/AMD/Intel anytime soon or ever. They're way too far ahead in the game and also backed by patents if any new player were to become a thereat.
I've been told by several people that distributor pricing for FPGAs is ridiculously inflated compared to what direct customers pay, and considering that one can apparently get a dev board on AliExpress for about $110 [1] while Digikey lists the FPGA alone for about $1880 [2], I believe it (this example isn't an UltraScale chip, but it is significantly bigger than the usual low-end Zynq 7000 boards sold to undergrads and tinkerers).
This is both true and false. While I work with Intel/Altera, Xilinx is basically the same.
That devboard is using recycled chips 100 percent. Their cost is almost nothing.
The kintex-7 part in question can probably be bought in volume quantities for around $190. Think 100kEAU.
This kind of price break comes with volume and is common with many other kinds of silicon besides FPGAs. Some product lines have more pricing pressure than others. For example, very popular MCUs may not get as wide of a price break. Some manufacturers price more fairly to distributors, some allow very large discounts.
I have some first- and second-hand experience with this, and you are correct. I'm not sure who benefits from this practice. It's anywhere from 5-25x cheaper in even small-ish quantities.
I'm personally too far from those negotiations to offer any likely-pivotal insight (such as a concrete quantity), but my very rough understanding is that there's some critical volume beyond which a customer basically becomes "made" with the Xilinx/Altera sales channels via a financially significant design win, at which point sales engineers etc. all but have a blank check to do things like comp development boards, advance a tray of whatever device is relevant to the design, etc..
Basically, as George Carlin put it, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it".
I don't have exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure you can get significant discounts starting around 100 parts. So not much at all.
Another thing to note is you can already get parts for significant discounts in 1-off quantities through legit Chinese distributors like LCSC. For example, a XC7A35T-2FGG484I is 90$ on Digikey and 20$ at LCSC. I think a personalized deal for that part would be cheaper than 20$ though...
Of course plenty of hobbies let people spend thousands (or more) so there's nothing wrong with that if you've got the money. But is it the end target for your project? Or do you have ambitions to go beyond that?