[_sbrk]

It's not just that the boards are expensive; you'll also need a Vivado license to create any designs for it. That license is at least several thousand dollars for the Versal devices.

[transpute]

It's taken many years of reverse engineering, but there's now an efficient OSS toolchain for the smaller Artix7 FPGA family, https://antmicro.com/blog/2020/05/multicore-vex-in-litex/

[_sbrk]

Artix 7 is simplistic compared to any of the Versal chips. You buy an expensive FPGA and then try using an "open-source" tool chain that exposes 25% of the FPGA's potential. Not a great trade-off, eh?

[tux3]

This blog doesn't seem to talk about the OSS toolchain, litex/vexriscv are very neat but they don't replace Vivado, right?