Main Differences Between Atrix-7 and Spartan-7?

[lekgolo167]

I recently finished a digital circuits class and we used the Basys 2 board with the spartan E3. I enjoyed the class a lot and decided to buy a FPGA board, I got the Arty with the Atrtix-7 chip.  After doing so,I saw a video of the new Arty releasing this summer with a spartan-7 chip. That made me wonder what is the difference between the two? If someone could explain the differences; like Pros and Cons of the two, and applications for both,  as well as the technical differences or specifications, that would be awesome!

[lekgolo167]

Thanks JColvin for the help,

and for anyone else reading this forum, I found these videos on xilinx's website that helps explain the spartan 7 and the other 7 series families.

Video about the spartan 7 overview

https://www.xilinx.com/video/fpga/spartan-7-technical-overview.html

video about the spatan 6/ atrtix 7/ spartan 7/ and zynq 7 comparison

https://www.xilinx.com/video/fpga/cost-optimized-fpga-soc-portfolio.html

[JColvin]

Hello,

We don't have a lot of information available on the Arty with the Spartan-7 chip available as of yet; you can learn a little bit more about it in this thread on our Forum. I'm pretty excited to see what it has as well since I don't really know anything more than what is mentioned in that thread.

Thanks,
JColvin

[lekgolo167]

On 4/29/2017 at 7:50 PM, JColvin said:

Hello,

We don't have a lot of information available on the Arty with the Spartan-7 chip available as of yet; you can learn a little bit more about it in this thread on our Forum. I'm pretty excited to see what it has as well since I don't really know anything more than what is mentioned in that thread.

Thanks,
JColvin

Okay, thanks i'll have to keep an eye on that thread. One thing I noticed on the product page for the arty-S7 is in the diagram it shows 16Mbit spi flash and in the list of specs it says 16 MB which is a big difference. Is it an error or am I mistaken?

 

Also, what are the major differences, applications, or prons and cons of the artix vs spartan families in general then? or in other words what is each family geared towards?

[JColvin]

Hello,

I don't know if the diagram was updated or not since you looked at it, but to me it looks like it shows 128 Mbit flash on the diagram which is equivalent to the 16 MB listed in the specs.

I personally don't know a lot of the differences between the Artix and Spartan families (although Xilinx of course has extensive datasheets on both of them if you wanted to peruse them). From my limited understanding, in general, the Spartan family of FPGAs has fewer resources available than their Artix "equivalents" (presuming that term can be used here). Naturally, this does depend on what chip you are looking at since there are some Spartan 7 chips that have more logic cells than some of the Artix 7 chips (as per Xilinx's 7-series FPGA overview). 

I don't know how the differences will play out in terms of the Digilent made board though, so we'll both get to wait and see. If I notice that more details that answer some of your questions get put up on our store page or social media channels, I'll try to post it back on this thread.

Thanks,
JColvin

[lekgolo167]

I guess im looking at a different page on the digilent web site. here's a screen shot one says 128Mbit and the other 128MB which i guess should say 16MB.

 

Thanks for the link and keeping me posted!

[JColvin]

That's the page I was looking at, but when I looked it had definitely said 16MB in the bulleted list, but now I'm seeing the same thing as you with the 128MB in the bulleted list and the 128 Mbit in the block diagram. I will find out what the appropriate spec is and make sure it gets updated.

I suspect that the 128 Mbit is correct since you have to type out several more letters so it is harder to be misinterpreted initially, but who knows.

Thank you for pointing out this discrepancy!

Thanks,
JColvin

[JColvin]

Hello @lekgolo167,

I learned that the 128 Mbit SPI Flash is correct and put in the request to get the webpage updated, although I hope that one day that Digilent goes for the 128 MB since who doesn't want access to a Gbit of flash?

Thanks,
JColvin