These new Achronix FPGAs look really interesting - very fast. However, trying to get any info out of the company is impossible. They won’t even tell me pricing for their dev kit! So, perhaps Sparkfun has enough pull to get something together. I’d be mostly interested in computational work, so throughput is more important than latency (for me), and cost is an issue - I’d be able to buy more boards as I was able to expand my project and show the funding organization that things were going well, rather than an high end board that would do everything I want but I couldn’t come up with the funding at the start of the project. As far as the specific FPGA to start with, choose a cheaper one but not the cheapest. At first, I just want to learn how to use them and to prove the concept, later (when money flows) more horsepower can be acquired.