Björn Ragnar Björnsson (bjorn.ragnar.delete@this.gmail.com) on October 27, 2020 4:03 pm wrote:
> Well, it's official Xilinx is merging with AMD. The rumors have been circulating a while and when
> I became aware of them my first thought was basically WTF? Having very little knowledge of what
> Xilinx offers I dipped my toes ever so slightly into what they bring to the industry and was in
> a relatively short period of time somewhat relieved that the merger could have some potential.
>
> ...
> Any thoughts appreciated.

Isn't there opportunities to add stuff into the processor chip, maybe in the lower layer of the stack (i.e. 22 nm) like:
- GPS/GLONASS/BDS/Galileo/QZSS/IRNSS receiver
- 5G modem
- SpaceX/Kuiper/OneWeb satellite internet modem
- very high bandwidth Ethernet 10G/25G/100G switch with easy interface/configuration
- Wifi modem
- different RAM controllers (NvRAM, raw FLASH interface, SECDED/DECTED ECC memory...)
- 4K video encoder/decoder (the real ones, which do not "squares" areas all the time)
Some of this stuff is very high frequency, maybe difficult to protect against radiation (invent and patent a layer of lead in between silicon stacks?), but they may not be used all at the same time so would not generate too much heat...