FPGAs are an amazing product that almost shouldn't exist if you think about the business and marketing concerns. They are a product that is too expensive at scale. If an application takes off, it is eventually cheaper and more performant to switch to ASICs, which is obvious when you see the 4-digit prices of the most sophisticated FPGAs.
Given how ruinously expensive silicon products are to bring to market, it's amazing that there are multiple companies competing (albeit in distinct segments).
FPGAs also seem like a largely untapped domain in general purpose computing, a bit like GPUs used to be. The ability to reprogram an FPGA to implement a new digital circuit in milliseconds would be a game changer for many workloads, except that current CPUs and GPUs are already very capable.
15155 · 7m ago
> The ability to reprogram an FPGA to implement a new digital circuit in milliseconds would be a game changer for many workloads
Someone has to design each of those reconfigurable digital circuits and take them through an implementation flow.
Only certain problems map well to easy FPGA implementation: anything involving memory access is quite tedious.
inamberclad · 8m ago
The problem is that the tools are still weak. The languages are difficult to use, nobody has made something more widely adopted than Verilog or VHDL. In addition, the IDEs are proprietary and the tools are fragile and not reproduceable. Synthesis results can vary from run to run on the exact same code with the same parameters, with real world impacts on performance. This all conspires to make FPGA development only suitable for bespoke products with narrow use cases.
I would love to see the open source world come to the rescue here. There are some very nice open source tools for Lattice FPGAs and Lattice's lawyers have essentially agreed to let the open source tools continue unimpeded (they're undoubtedly driving sales), but the chips themselves can't compete with the likes of Xilinx.
checker659 · 35m ago
I think FPGAs (or CGRAs really) will make a comeback once LLMs can directly generate FPGA bitstreams.
15155 · 10m ago
What does "directly generate FPGA bitstreams" mean?
Given how ruinously expensive silicon products are to bring to market, it's amazing that there are multiple companies competing (albeit in distinct segments).
FPGAs also seem like a largely untapped domain in general purpose computing, a bit like GPUs used to be. The ability to reprogram an FPGA to implement a new digital circuit in milliseconds would be a game changer for many workloads, except that current CPUs and GPUs are already very capable.
Someone has to design each of those reconfigurable digital circuits and take them through an implementation flow.
Only certain problems map well to easy FPGA implementation: anything involving memory access is quite tedious.
I would love to see the open source world come to the rescue here. There are some very nice open source tools for Lattice FPGAs and Lattice's lawyers have essentially agreed to let the open source tools continue unimpeded (they're undoubtedly driving sales), but the chips themselves can't compete with the likes of Xilinx.
Placement and routing is an NP-Complete problem.