Quick search shows Altera held 30% of the FPGA market. That puts AMD’s $50B acquisition of Xilinx (which holds ~50% of the market) in an awkward light. Using some extremely crude math, Xilinx’s fair market value might now be closer to ~$15B.
Did AMD massively overpay, or has the FPGA market fundamentally shifted? Curious to see how this new benchmark ripples into AMD’s stock valuation.
The FPGA market shifted. For a brief moment they were allowed to be on BOMs of end user devices due to the rest of the computing field lagging behind somewhat. That period, as far as I can tell, is over.
My anecdotal example would be high end broadcast audio processors. These do quite a bit beyond the actual processing of audio, in particular, into baseband or even RF signal generation.
In any case these devices used to be fully analog, then when they first went digital were a combination of DSPs for processing and FPGAs for signal output. Later generations dropped the DSP and did everything in larger FPGAs as the larger FPGAs became available. Later generations dropped the whole stack and just run on an 8 core Intel processor using real time linux and some specialized real time signal processing software with custom designed signal generators.
The high core and high frequency CPUs became good enough and getting custom made chips became exceptionally cheap as well. FPGAs became rather pointless in this pipline.
The US military, for a time, had a next generation radio specification that specifically called for the use of FPGAs, as that would allow them to make manufacturer agnostic radios and custom software for them. That never panned out but it shows the peak use of FPGAs to manage the constraints of this time period.
There’s an interesting middle-ground worth mentioning: a 2-in-1 connector https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Rego-Electronics/845-00... that can take both HDMI and DisplayPort cables, which could be a neat solution for devices juggling both standards.
This reminds me of MIT’s work on femto-photography to see around corners. They used ultrafast laser pulses to bounce light off walls, capturing the reflections from hidden objects. By analyzing the time-of-flight data, they could reconstruct 3D shapes of objects not in direct view.
<https://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/cornar/>
Finally, LLMs have brought us to the threshold of ancestral simulation. It's like the universe hit 'retry' on humanity, but this time with AI as the dungeon master.
For folks who have actually set up srsRAN for anything besides a trivial configuration w/ one eNB and manual management of most things (and even then), the value-add of having Amazon worry about most of that stuff is clear. It's, ah, ... complicated.
This is a bit like responding to, say, the original announcement of EC2 with a link to download a Linux distribution.
Did AMD massively overpay, or has the FPGA market fundamentally shifted? Curious to see how this new benchmark ripples into AMD’s stock valuation.
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