The next (obvious) question: What's gonna happen w/ Xilinx.
For the longest time, the FPGA market has been dominated by Xilinx and Altera. With one joining Intel, it seems logical to expect a response?
For the longest time, the FPGA market has been dominated by Xilinx and Altera. With one joining Intel, it seems logical to expect a response?
Altera will have a process advantage over Xilinx and there is nothing that can be done about it. While everyone is talking 14nm, Intel is shipping it and talking 10nm.
This deal makes more sense than any I've seen. Altera gets to use the best fabs in the world to gain an advantage over their competitors. Intel gets to deploy to a new (to them) market where the volumes are lower but the ASPs are higher - this is good given the ever increasing costs of making chips and the lower yields likely at 10nm and 7nm. It looks like a purely strategic move for both companies.
Edit: ha! Apparently, "One reason why Altera is attractive to Intel is that Altera is already using Intel's fab to create its latest generation FPGAs and SoCs; Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs are being implemented using TSMC's 20nm process, while Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs are leveraging Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate process (see Altera & Intel to Collaborate on Multi-Die 14nm FPGAs). Furthermore, Altera is also using Intel's state-of-the-art packaging technologies."
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326736&_mc=sm_ee...
edit: even if they just opened up the bitfile format. I believe it's a similar situation as GPU instructions sets though: managers saying "no because patents".
[0] https://github.com/cseed/arachne-pnr
Does it support user constraints on relative placement (and routing)? Self-timed logic, such as NULL Convention Logic [1], doesn't fit well with the synchronous FPGA paradigm, but can be implement on those if the feedback loops are tightly controlled [2]. I'd like to play with that :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Asynchronous-Circuits-Convention-Synthesis/dp/1598299816
For their lower end chips (All the Spartan series, the larger of the 6 series are still quite useful) they straight up announced an end of development on the main toolchain (ISE) with no plans for support on their newer one.
For example, if intel wanted, it could have built a decent FPGA, probably in a reasonable time(there were startups that built decent fpga's).
But building good fpga software ? that it couldn't do, first because it's really hard and second because you need tens of thousands of designs from your customers to run on this in ordered to make good software. That's not something acquirable.
OSS development has proven to be a useful tool as part of greater business models.
Here is a link that explains the process: http://curtis.io/others-work/open-tooling-for-fpgas
As for android - Again it was a strategic necessity for Google, since it needed that distribution point for it's huge ad business. Operating systems are a winner takes all business and the most effective, lowest risk strategy to get there was open sourcing, even though it's kind of a loss leader. And even with only partially open-sourcing android , Google is at constant risk of losing control of android.
The situation in FPGA is different - if altera opens the tool, xilinx and other companies will probably use it , and we'll probably see multiple companies compete on the business.
- Altera will now likely lose early access to all the non-Intel fabs. And sometimes one of the non-Intel fabs come up with a process advantage before Intel does. Fabs love to work with FPGA vendors: the regular structure makes them good targets for new processes; and FPGA vendors are the only people that can sell a single chip for $50,000.
- Big guys are only interested in big markets: Altera may abandon some of the smaller niches they currently play in.
I'm sure there are other advantages Xilinx gains by staying independent.
I heard that this has changed and mobile chips are being used for "pipe cleaning" in fabs, from a credible source, but i haven't dug into the details of how.
They'll get acquired by someone, probably in a year or two. If they lose their market leadership in the meantime, the acquisition will be for less than 17B.
They really need to invest in their software and tool flow right now. That's where they have a strong lead.