Re:Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
by shaklee3 on Thursday December 05, 2019 @12:45AM
(#21710258)
FPGAs are in a tough place. Like OP said, most people writing RTL make asics, or at least an asic that's programmable. The FPGA target market is getting slimmer, since we have programmable Asics, like GPUs and tpus, that are as performant with easier programming. They will still serve a niche market, but the "write c++ and run on an fpga" will likely never take off.
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Re:Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
by solidasparagus on Thursday December 05, 2019 @02:50AM
(#21710645)
I thought the main market for FPGAs was that period between "we have a problem that needs custom hardware" and "we have custom hardware being produced at the scale we need". I guess that's a relatively niche market?
Re:Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
by timthorn on Thursday December 05, 2019 @06:44AM
(#21711611)
There's also the market for high performance things that need to be in-service upgradeable. I understand mobile base stations are a significant customer for large FPGAs, to enable deployment of new standards revisions/modulation schemes without a truck roll.
Re:Coming Soon: AWS Graviton2 Processor for AWS
by pjc50 on Thursday December 05, 2019 @06:16AM
(#21711486)
Pretty much. The problem set they're useful for is low-latency high-throughput stuff, and/or connectivity to high speed digital signals, for things that there isn't an existing custom solution and where you don't care about area or power consumption. That's not a huge market.
We do use them at my employer, a multinational chip company - but only in very small numbers, like one $50k board gets shared around project groups who use it for a few weeks each. Most of the work is done in simulation.