Comment by rasz
5 days ago
Intel FPGA venture made tons more sense than AMD following it. FPGAs are great at filling up your idle fabs and honing engineering skills on reaching high yields.
Selling now also makes sense. There was only one serious competitor in 2015. Now you got Tariffs both ways to the main place where everything is build, and said place has own homegrown vendors like GOWIN, Sipeed, Efinix. But the biggest reason is amount of stuff designed in the West/Taiwan is falling with China taking over actual product design.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/08/19/how-innovative-is-c...
>In 2015, China released its “Made in China 2025” (MIC 2025) strategy, which refined some of these targets, setting a goal of achieving 40 percent self-sufficiency in semiconductors by 2020 and 70 percent by 2025.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
>In 2024, the majority of MIC 2025's goals were considered to be achieved, despite U.S. efforts to curb the program.
Products coming out of China no longer use STM microcontrollers, Vishay/Analog mosfets/diodes and Altera/Xilinx FPGAs. Its all Chinese semiconductor brands you never heard about. Good example is this teardown of Deye SUN-5K-SG04LP1 5kW hybrid solar inverter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0_cTg36A2Q
Intel was looking to sell Altera for over a year before Trump's Tariff Tourettes. And I bet it wasn't the hardware that was the problem, it was the software. No matter how amazing your FPGA hardware is, it is useless if you can't also produce high-quality software for operating it. For CPUs you can just tell people to use gcc or clang, not so with FPGAs.