Re: what is the fastest speed that FPGA deals with CPU?

"walala" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> Dear all,
> 
> Is PCI the only convinient interfacing unit that talks with CPU by inserting
> something into a computer conviniently? What is the speed of that? Is there
> any faster method?
PCI is the only relatively fast interface that is available on almost
any computer for internal extensions and has good operating system
support for hardware drivers. The usual 32-Bit, 33MHz PCI can provide
133MB/s in theory of which about 90MByte/s are usable without to much
effort for writes, considerably less for reads. There are also 66MHz
and/or 64-Bit variants available on more expensive mainboards.

But there are lots of alternatives.
There are faster "PCI-like" interfaces like AGP, PCI-X, PCI-Express
(only possible with some FPGAs).
You can also connect your hardware via ATA or SCSI busses. That's
about the speed of PCI. For data aquisition tasks you can make your
hardware look like a tape drive so that you do not need to write a
driver and readout software. Just use the tar command for that.

Probably the fastest interface inside a PC is a memory slot. But
getting OS support for your device in this case is not straight
forward. But there are a couple of GByte/s available there.

And then you can use all the external interfaces: FireWire, USB,
Ethernet, ...

Kolja Sulimma