Which board? - Desktop or Embedded

[Castle]

Hi.

Just joined up, and am new to FPGAs and the parallella, but have been developing software for a few decades. I'm looking to get an initial board to learn a bit about developing on FPGA and am interested in the possibility of getting a few to act as a coprocessor to my PC for some particular calculations. Please forgive my newbie questions and vagueness.

I am trying to work out which board to order - the desktop or embedded.

The embedded board uses the 7020 chip instead of the 7010 which seems to have more logic units. Is this available for one's programs, or is it used for somethng else on the system? As far as I know I have no need for hooking it up to other circuits, other than to other parallella boards / storage / PC in the future to increase overall processing capacity.

Thanks in advance

[tnt]

The 7020 additional logic is free for your own usage. If you're interested in doing FPGA stuff, that's definitely what I'd go for.
Note that it heats up a little more than the 7010 and depending on what you do in the FPGA, it could actually heat even more, so don't forget a fan !

[Castle]

Thanks tnt. I appreciate the reply Probably worth the extra cash then!

I did wonder if a liquid cooled coldplate maybe an idea, especially if clustering a few together. I wonder if any parallella user have done this.