The synopsis of the guy's argument is: Given Intel bought Altera, and rumors that *comm is eyeing Xilinx, that's likely to shift the focus of both tier 1 FPGA companies to datacenters and away from traditional programmable logic.
We need a good Friday thread, it's been a while. What do y'all think?
-- Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com Email address domain is currently out of order. See above to fix.
People need FPGAs. You can't economically produce flexible, workable products which are true hardware IC, and completely variable, without them. You'd be back to the model we had in the 80s and 90s where you must hire firms to design things for you, and that's an expense that companies won't want ... so someone would follow-on with an FPGA, even if it's slower because it has to work around patents. Someone will maintain that industry because it's essential to both design, and use in real products.
There are also several other FPGA manufacturers that make lesser products that may immediately be viable alternatives, or are then targets in the industry for immediate growth into larger, more capable products.
Best regards, Rick C. Hodgin
Someone will come and pick up the pieces, possibly at a profit.
I believe that there are east Asian FPGA companies out there -- with luck, they'd see sales opportunities over here if the Big Two dropped out of the race. With bad luck, America will just export raw materials to countries who turn them into consumer goods, we'll all be dirt poor except for a very few, and we will have lost the Revolutionary War 250 years after the fact, only not to England.
-- Tim Wescott Control systems, embedded software and circuit design I'm looking for work! See my website if you're interested http://www.wescottdesign.com
I think the article overstates the dichotomy of supporting the traditional FPGA market and the datacenter market. Will FPGAs need to vary so much to support one market vs. the other? They are hugely programmable. Neither X nor A have pushed much on alternate architectures that might be a significant advantage in a particular market. I think it will mostly be steady as she goes with most of the changes in marketing rather than engineering.
-- Rick C
Not sure if it's the case in functionality, but I'm definitely seeing shift in market focus. It used to be that I could go to any of my distributors and have FPGAs that were effectively guaranteed to be stocking; ship two days later. Now no one stocks, I have to keep a fairly large buffer of parts on-site locally, and all of the interest seems to be in making bulk sales to large customers rather than fanning out to small ones. To what degree that's a function of the shifting vision of the FPGA vendors or not, that's opaque to me. But it's definitely real.
-- Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com Email address domain is currently out of order. See above to fix.
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