Depends on what you&#x27;re wanting to do.The OSS toolchains have matured a lot since then, with parts from Lattice being fairly well supported if you don&#x27;t want to touch a vendor&#x27;s tooling.Gowin have some of the more interesting new parts which sit on a different part of the cost&#x2F;feature curve. The Tang Nano boards seem fairly popular but I only have experience with far larger GW5 parts.The newer parts from Intel&#x2F;AMD have increasingly impressive hard-peripherals and internal features, but not that relevant unless you know what you want&#x2F;need.

(2019). What&#x27;s the latest on sub-$100 FPGAs this decade, anything significantly better than the Mojo I picked up back in 2013 to tinker with?

I&#x27;ve started to dabble in this only very recently. I have two iCEBreaker boards [0] in the mail right now that I&#x27;m excited for.From what I understand, one of the big advantages of the up5k chip (the same chip on the webfpga and the icebreaker) is that there&#x27;s an open toolchain that runs in seconds (at this chip size), which is not the case in the closed&#x2F;Vivado&#x2F;&quot;typical fpga&quot; part of the world. (feel free to correct me)Purely in simulation this week, I had Claude (Fable) design a working Tetris out of 1400 relays - originally, this was for a Minivac web simulator that I&#x2F;Fable had built [1]. Then, it compiled the relay netlist to Verilog and ran it on the simulated chip, comparing this (bezerk) port relay-for-relay against the original simulator. All matching (total llm time: less than an hour). I had it also make a viz of the netlist blinking through one simulated run [2] - sort of like visual6502.org..!Today, I (Fable) ported tinystories [3], a very small language model to this exact same chip. It&#x27;s currently &quot;golfing&quot; to get it to fit onto the real, not simulated chip (it&#x27;s ~10% over, I&#x27;m hopeful). EDIT: it just golfed it.None of these are &quot;use cases&quot;, but these boards seem small&#x2F;cheap enough that you can do new deranged things with them, which is very very exciting to me. I see a great future.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1bitsquared.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;icebreaker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1bitsquared.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;icebreaker</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;minivac.greg.technology&#x2F;tetris&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;minivac.greg.technology&#x2F;tetris&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;necessary-doom-48128.ondis.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;necessary-doom-48128.ondis.co&#x2F;</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2305.07759" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2305.07759</a>

Examples include:* replacements for the C64 PLA, CIA, and potentially the SID* Glue logic for a bread board project where it would require a lot of 74 or 4k series logic* Translating TTL to VGA
etc.These are things people have used FPGAs for quite commonly

ICE40UP5K is large enough to synthesize a simple RISC-V CPU with some basic peripherals. It&#x27;s not huge or fast, but it&#x27;s capable enough.

small what boards? Do esp32 boards count?

Direct link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0D9Q8VSSM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0D9Q8VSSM</a>“KooingTech 150MHZ Machine Pulse Chip Mode Chip ACE V3 for X360 Slim”

Jailbreaking consoles<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a.co&#x2F;d&#x2F;05f9gq9A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a.co&#x2F;d&#x2F;05f9gq9A</a>

Outside of hello worlds, I’m always struggling to find a use case for such small boards. Any ideas?

+1. Especially given that it can even run in the browser - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yowasp.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yowasp.org&#x2F;</a>

I guess it&#x27;s for people who only have a smartphone. Or a potato that is ok for browsing, but not for FPGA synthesis.

Why do the synthesis in the cloud, and not locally?

WebFPGA