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What I'm having trouble understanding (as just a regular, not-hardcore programmer) is this: What end-user advantage will cause people to buy devices that includ
by catern 12y ago
What I'm having trouble understanding (as just a regular, not-hardcore programmer) is this: What end-user advantage will cause people to buy devices that include FPGAs? What use are they to a consumer? What interesting programs or devices can be created with an FPGA that can't be done otherwise?
Basically, if "everyone can easily create whatever custom objects they need!" is the utopian vision for 3D printers, and "everyone can self-host their services and protect their privacy and freedom!" is the utopian vision for a home server[0], what is the utopian vision here?
[0] Such as one running https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
- davexunit 12y ago> What end-user advantage will cause people to buy devices that include FPGAs? Well, the "consumer" (a term I do not like) would never even know there was an FPGA in their device.
- catern 12y agoSure, but what would cause manufacturers to start putting those FPGAs in those devices?
- fragmede 12y ago> What end-user advantage will cause people to buy devices that include FPGAs? As always, cost is a large motivator, and here's a concrete example. Back in the day, 3ware, the makers of real hardware RAID cards shipped a line of PCI (or were they IDE?) cards that had an FPGA instead of an ASIC. You can bet that making an ASIC would have been far more costly to produce compared to an FPGA. As far as your utopian vision goes, GNU Radio is probably it, but uptake on that has also been slow.