They'd write a limited test for a feature based on an ask from the software team garbled by a five layer game of telephone. Claim that the module passed validation. A few months later the software folks would have to pull a few all nighters to figure out how to work around the resulting turd during bringup.
It doesn't help that FPGAs are not made at the same scale as CPUs so don't benefit from the economies of scale.
I'm super curious if you have thoughts on specific pieces of software that would be economically better because I've thought about this in my niche and sort of come to the conclusion that it won't help.
I do think things like SIMD in CPUs will get more use and maybe we will get more difficult to program for CPU features, but I haven't found a use case where off the shelf FPGA components would help with typical software.
The tooling is open source, and Fable in a loop - especially when paired with a digital scope that Fable interfaces with (the Saleae’s [1] are great) - gives you a level of verifiability that feels like beyond what software typically gives you. ie it feels more like Lean than code with tests.
I had ai implement a few toy circuits (sha hashing, 8088 emulation, a tiny llm) but yeah. Still looking for fun applications.
There have been a few recent fpga threads on hn, check them out. [2][3]
[0] https://1bitsquared.com/products/icebreaker
is the world we live in, planning things while waiting for a more powerful LLM
> When the first chips came back from the foundry in May, the team pointed its internal AI models at designing software to run benchmarks such as SemiAnalysis’s InferenceX. On DeepSeek’s multi-head latent attention kernel benchmark, performance climbed from 0.31 percent of the theoretical ceiling (set by the chip’s compute and memory bandwidth) to 88.94 percent in roughly 40 hours. Ho says this result is repeatable, so the time between when foundries deliver the first chips and when production ramps up can be reduced. “All our schedule assumptions are going to be based on the fact we have this capability now,” he says.