By: Rob Thorpe (noone.delete@this.nowhere.com), October 28, 2020 12:40 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Björn Ragnar Björnsson (bjorn.ragnar.delete@this.gmail.com) on October 27, 2020 4:03 pm wrote:
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> Any thoughts appreciated.
I think there are other points-of-view that people are missing.
Xilinx FPGAs are RAM based FPGAs. They're mostly made out of many copies of the same simple blocks. The most common of those are similar to RAM. Because of this, those simple parts of them can be tailored closely to a process. Microprocessor companies like AMD do effectively the same thing with their cache RAM.
There's the possibility to save on R&D costs here, since the products are at least fairly similar. For a long time FPGAs have been launched on fairly cutting-edge processes. Quite often they have been nearly as cutting-edge as microprocessors. I don't know enough about this part of the industry to be sure. Perhaps someone who does can chime in.
Another issue is the fab companies. I have worked in businesses that buy from TSMC and other big foundries. The bigger customers have more clout. I think this is part of the attraction of mergers. A larger organization can also gather more information about the capabilities of the foundries.
...
> Any thoughts appreciated.
I think there are other points-of-view that people are missing.
Xilinx FPGAs are RAM based FPGAs. They're mostly made out of many copies of the same simple blocks. The most common of those are similar to RAM. Because of this, those simple parts of them can be tailored closely to a process. Microprocessor companies like AMD do effectively the same thing with their cache RAM.
There's the possibility to save on R&D costs here, since the products are at least fairly similar. For a long time FPGAs have been launched on fairly cutting-edge processes. Quite often they have been nearly as cutting-edge as microprocessors. I don't know enough about this part of the industry to be sure. Perhaps someone who does can chime in.
Another issue is the fab companies. I have worked in businesses that buy from TSMC and other big foundries. The bigger customers have more clout. I think this is part of the attraction of mergers. A larger organization can also gather more information about the capabilities of the foundries.