If you want a cheap Gige capable development board have a look at the Lattice Versa at:

http://www.latticesemi.com/products/fpga/ecp3/ecp3surgepromotions.cfm

Features 2 Marvell (no data sheets ;-( )GigE PHYS, a megabyte of DDR3 ram and a pcie 1X interface and a Lattice epc3 fpga all for (currently) $99 US. Even at the regular price of $299 US this is a deal compared to any other boards I've found (mostly $1000 and up). The epc3 fpga isn't supported by the free version of the Diamond software so you probably also need to buy a Diamond license for $99 (I got a 1 year license for the ecp3 only for free with my first Versa board, the $99 license appears to be a full version of the software, and not to bad anyway). There is demo software that implements a basic (very basic :-)) web server available from the Lattice site using their open source softcore processor that includes enough information to figure out the PHY register requirements without the data sheet (which is NDA only and apparently hard to get). It also uses their licensed TrimodeMAC IP, but it has an eval version that will run for about an hour for free to experiment with (and I haven't actually seen my eval copy stop working yet anyway :-)). It should be possible to port the opencores trimode MAC to this platform (I guess I;ll find out if I'm smart enough to do that). Then finding or writing a driver for the DDR3 ram (the Lattice one is licensed again) and creating hardware to to allow loading it (the onboard flash looks only big enough for the FPGA config and the demo software uses all the internal memory on the fpga to run) will be needed but the result should be a killer board. My first one is up and running and I can rebuild the demo software and load and run it. I'm now seeing if I can port ttcp in to the onboard ram to see how fast it will go (my guess is not anywhere near wire speed due to PIO rather than DMA to the MAC, but I hope to see soon :-)) so I know it works that far.
I don't work for Lattice, I'm just a happy customer who appreciates the good
deal :-).

Peter Van Epp

I have two of these, it is a great value for $99, a steal actually. I also have two digilent atlys boards, I like the versa better for the money.

I have purchasing one. the ECP3 verse have 2 GbPHY and PCI-ex 1 port. It is very effective evaluation solution for me.