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Comment by almostgotcaught

5 days ago

You worked at Xilinx and you're not aware that FPGA is not a growing segment?

    > FPGA is not a growing segment

What is replacing it? Single board computers? Or are APUs from ARM "good enough" and "cheap enough" now to replace FPGA?

  • There is literally no market for FPGA as coprocessor/accelerator and there never was (that was some kind of pipe/hype dream before GPGPU took off). Where there is a market for them (prototyping ASICs, automotive, whatever, network switches, etc) there is no replacement but there is also no growth.

    • Depends entirely how you define "growth". If you take AI, LLM as your baseline of growth, then yeah, sure. But what else is growing?

      FPGAs are getting cheaper with each gen, expanding into low cost, high volume markets that were unthinkable for an FPGA 10 years ago. Lattice has an FPGA family specifically targeted to smartphones, and I've been consulting for a high end audio company that wanted to do some dsp, and a cheap FPGA was the best option in the market for the particular implementation that they wanted to do.

      It's not sexy growth, but it's growth. Otherwise, we wouldn't had the explosion of the latest years in low end FPGA companies.

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