Probably worry about the future of access and direction for FPGAs. Most acquisitions of FPGA companies resulted in worse products afterwards. I'm probably suffering from confirmation bias here.

Is there any example of a FPGA provider delivering better products after acquisition?

EDIT: I'd wager that if the last administration hadn't blocked the sale of Lattice it would now be dead.

> Most acquisitions of FPGA companies

> any example of a FPGA provider

Are there lots of FPGA companies that have gotten acquired in the first place? Only Altera comes to my mind.

Atmel had some FPGAs when acquired by Microchip. Albeit Microchip is sort of where chip families go to die, so I wouldn't draw a trend from that.

Would the Xilinx/AMD acquisition make Lattice the biggest independent FPGA vendor?

Many of Lattice's FPGAs were acquisitions as well. The iCE series came from SiliconBlue; ECP5 came from Silicon Image.

Actel was acquired by Microsemi that was acquired by Microchip.

In my opinion they have only gotten better. That said - my opinion of Actel was pretty close to the floor.

From my current perspective Actel was ok for its time. I worked with APA150 FPGAs in the past and for that ancient time it was ok. I heard, Microchip has cool SoC with RISC-V nowadays. I just don’t have time to play with them after work.

Altera and Xilinx are the only two FPGAs out there ;)

Uh at the high end there is Achronix and then the lower end you have Microchip(ex Microsemi(ex-Actel) and Lattice, Efinx and there are a couple of Chinese startups.

lattice?

I don't have stocks in either companies, but I can see why a Xilinx stockholder might object.

From the AMD side of things, it's just expanding their offerings, and maybe bringing in some know-how and technologies that could help boost/extend their existing products.

If you have Xilinx stocks because you believe in what they're doing and predicting a bright future and possible dividend while at the same time don't see much of a future in the AMD64 platform, then why would you want AMD to the company.

Most stockholders don't care about the companies they invest in any more. It doesn't matter if they make FPGAs, cars or toaster ovens. What matters is that you can make a profit buying a stock now and selling it at a higher place down the road. Those kinds of stockholder won't block an AMD takeover if the price is right.

> What matters is that you can make a profit buying a stock now and selling it at a higher place down the road.

Making a profit has been the point of buying and selling stocks literally since day one, when the Dutch East India Company issued publicly tradeable shares in 1602.

If you want to show your support for the vision of a company, buy their t-shirts. If you're buying their shares (typically not even from the company itself, but from another shareholder) for that reason, you're doing it wrong.

amd64 isn't going away any time soon. Intel is still the largest player here. If I were Intel right now, I'd be trying to come up with the next iteration of x86, probably 256 bit.

There don’t seem to be many advantages to words larger that 64 IMO (they do exist, but things like GMP exist for that). If the purpose would be parallel processing (a la SIMD), we already have “256 bit x86” with AVX2. IIRC, Intel’s x86 chips can process 256 bits of integer data at the same time. And if you want 512 bits, AVX-512 exists as well (but it’s implemented internally as two sequences of 256 bit data)

> 256 bit

but, why? do we need more than 16 exabytes of memory?

Right. Does anyone even need a megabyte? As Bill Gates famously (didn’t) say, “640k ought to be enough for anybody”.

Joking aside, we very well may one day have more memory available that 64 address lines can handle. RISC-V’s spec does have a stub chapter for “RV128”