8 ms·
Given that FPGA dev tools are much harder to develop than FPGA chips(at that company scale), i don't think intel will open them.
by minthd 11y ago
Given that FPGA dev tools are much harder to develop than FPGA chips(at that company scale), i don't think intel will open them.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoI don't understand the logic there. No FPGA vendor will ever turn a profit on their EDA-ware, and nobody would ever buy an FPGA without it. Open the stuff up and let people do some of the heavy lifting. They can still sell value-added bits and bobs if the want, and can concentrate on usability, something they sorely need to do.
- minthd 11y agoIn business - "the hard part" == "competitive advantage" . If you open source that , soon you'll see more competitors knocking on your doors. 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.
- aswanson 11y agoBut whatever level of advantage they have here now is negated by xilinxes existence of a toolset with roughly that level of engineering effort. So why not, in the least, consider damaging the only true competition by opening up?
- Hytosys 11y agoWhy does any company make open source software, then? WebKit, Android, OpenGL, and OpenCV (Intel) are certainly hard to develop. OSS development has proven to be a useful tool as part of greater business models.
- Thimothy 11y ago"Compiling" for a FPGA is far harder than your regular processor compiling, where you "just" translate your high level code to machine code. Here is a link that explains the process: http://curtis.io/others-work/open-tooling-for-fpgas http://curtis.io/others-work/open-tooling-for-fpgas
- Hytosys 11y agoRight, I understand. Logic synthesis entails constraint solving and other big domain-specific challenges. It is a very difficult problem. (So are web rendering, OS development, graphics API design, and computer vision.)
- minthd 11y agoIf we look at WebKit, And OpenCV and i think OpenGL , the software is really a complement to the real business and are less hard to develop than the main products.Also they are all in the API business - where developers demand open source and have enough power . 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.