Comment by Traster

I was quite surprised the direction this article took. I wasn't expecting reheated whinging about the toolchain.

FPGAs do need a new future. They need a future where someone tapes out an FPGA! Xilinx produced Ultrascale+ over a decade ago and haven't done anything interesting since. Their Versal devices went off a tangent into SoCs, NOCs, AI engines - you know what they didn't do? Build a decent FPGA.

Altera did something ambitious back in 2014 when they proposed the hyper-register design, totally failed to execute on it and have been treading water because of the Intel cluster**. They're now an independent company but literally don't have anyone who knows how to tape out a chip.

I'm less familiar with the Lattice stuff, but since their most advanced product is still 16nm finfet I suspect they aren't doing anything newer than Xilinx or Altera.

We need a company that builds an FPGA. It doesn't matter what tooling you have because the fundamental performance gap between a custom FPGA solution and a CPU or GPU based solution is entirely eaten up by the fact the newest FPGA you can buy is a decade old and inexplicably still tens of thousands of dollars.

If FPGA technology had progressed at the same rate NVidia or Apple had pushed forward CPU/GPU performance, thered be some amazing opportunities to accelerate AI (on the path to then creating ASICs). But they haven't, so all the scaling laws have worked against them and the places they have a performance benefit have shrunk massively.