3 ms·
Couple things-- 1) You underestimate how critical prototyping has become, again likely since you say it's been a couple decades. Time to market has become more
by ljhsiung 6y ago
Couple things--
1) You underestimate how critical prototyping has become, again likely since you say it's been a couple decades. Time to market has become more important, and verification has become harder as CPUs have gotten even more complex. FPGAs enable cosimulation and emulation, leading to faster iteration of both design and verification efforts and thus better TTM.
FPGAs are so important in the hardware development process that I would even say you're not a serious hardware company if you don't have any FPGA frameworks to design silicon.
2) As others have mentioned, FPGAs are also critical for low-latency workloads that require constant tweaks-- high frequency trading (ugh...) comes to mind. The need for "constant tweaks" could also be satisfied with just "normal" software, but that has higher latency as opposed to an FPGA, and FPGAs can get some crazy performance if you're willing to pay the price (south of 7 figures).
Overall sure, usage of FPGAs might be niche compared to, idk, Javascript; but it's commonplace/practically essential in hardware.
- reassembled 6y agoWhenever discussion of FPGA comes up on HN, someone inevitably points to low latency workflows but nobody ever mentions video capture and play-out boards using FPGAs. Companies like Blackmagic, Elgato, Matrox, etc.
- sgerenser 6y agoHardware like this often uses FPGAs because there’s a need for highly parallel processing that is difficult or even impossible to do on a off the shelf CPU, but the volumes are too low to justify a custom ASIC. Being able to fix bugs or add features after shipping is a big bonus too.