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With all accelerators, GPUs, FPGAs etc., the solution to me seems pretty simple. Give it away. Like literally give them away like usb sticks in a parking lot. A

With all accelerators, GPUs, FPGAs etc., the solution to me seems pretty simple. Give it away. Like literally give them away like usb sticks in a parking lot. All these companies and startups work on raising massive rounds and focus on enterprise sales and deals with national labs etc., while the average joe has nothing to tinker with. Everybody who mattered had a cheap GPU, and a cheap x86 system before that. That's what drives adoption.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Back in the early 2000s you just had to put your email into a developers' sign-up list and tiny startups nobody had ever heard of like NVIDIA would ship you a GPU nearly a full year before it was available to mainstream customers. Fun times...
PaulHoule 4y ago
There are FPGA dev kits that are fairly affordable. It's probably still cheaper to get a breadboard and a bag of 54xx chips if you want to learn digital logic but I'd say the problem for hobby FPGAs is that the developer tools are poor and the FPGA vendors keep the bitstream format secret so there is no competition to produce better developer's tools. I was also going to mention some dev boards NVIDIA had come out in the last few years that were affordable (I think) but they are all out of stock now and the ones you can get are $2000+ now.
rasz 4y ago
Intel tried that in its own way. Galileo/Edison Quark based products, lasted 2 years and was pure shit. They entered Arduino hobby embedded world with microcontroller like x86 without dedicated fast IO (it could do something like 1KHz max) and no support/documentation. Intel version of giving it away was pricing slightly below? competition with similar spec (400MHz) while targeting 8bit 16MHz market :-) Nowadays only Chinese seem to be able to give it away to grow market share. $1 Espressif is a good example, Govin $7 GW1N-1 fpga devboards. Raspberry <$1 RP2040 is one western exception I could come up with.

jiggawatts 4y ago

Back in the early 2000s you just had to put your email into a developers' sign-up list and tiny startups nobody had ever heard of like NVIDIA would ship you a GPU nearly a full year before it was available to mainstream customers. Fun times...

PaulHoule 4y ago

There are FPGA dev kits that are fairly affordable. It's probably still cheaper to get a breadboard and a bag of 54xx chips if you want to learn digital logic but I'd say the problem for hobby FPGAs is that the developer tools are poor and the FPGA vendors keep the bitstream format secret so there is no competition to produce better developer's tools. I was also going to mention some dev boards NVIDIA had come out in the last few years that were affordable (I think) but they are all out of stock now and the ones you can get are $2000+ now.

rasz 4y ago

Intel tried that in its own way. Galileo/Edison Quark based products, lasted 2 years and was pure shit. They entered Arduino hobby embedded world with microcontroller like x86 without dedicated fast IO (it could do something like 1KHz max) and no support/documentation. Intel version of giving it away was pricing slightly below? competition with similar spec (400MHz) while targeting 8bit 16MHz market :-) Nowadays only Chinese seem to be able to give it away to grow market share. $1 Espressif is a good example, Govin $7 GW1N-1 fpga devboards. Raspberry <$1 RP2040 is one western exception I could come up with.