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Cheaper, More Powerful Alternative To FPGAs
holy_calamity writes "Technology Review takes a look at a competitor to FPGAs claimed to be significantly faster and cheaper. Startup Tabula recently picked up another $108m in funding and says their chips make it economic to ship products with reconfigurable hardware, enabling novel upgrade strategies that include hardware as well as software."
The real problem with FPGAs is the painfully byzantine tools you have to use to deal with them. The chips themselves are fine.
There is a lot of room for disruption in the programmable logic tools industry. If this company is smart, they will focus on workflow and toolchain innovations, rather than becoming too distracted by shiny silicon baubles. Shorten the edit-simulate-synthesize-test cycle and you will make a lot of people happy.
Then again, you should never argue with a man who buys his ink by the gallon, or his wafers by the acre.
I've got kicked out of school with an EE degree, gone into software business (yeah, I know), and never looked back.
Do they ship products, other than dev kits, with FPGA?
All the time. They tend to be low volume items with high unit cost. Cisco has been a big consumer FPGAs forever. It's not even all that uncommon to find FPGA's in consumer electronics, though they tend to be very small parts used a glue logic.
For sure. Don't worry about getting the hardware working exactly right, we'll ship it now and release an upgrade later.
the guy behind Tabula is behind a number of "failwins" in the electronics industry - a fail in that the technology ended up being pointless and rejected by the market, but wins in that his companies were all bought out by suckers for quite a bit of $$$$
two examples:
- X initiative (use 45 degree routing on chips) - look at http://www.xinitiative.org now - 100% dead. look at it, and all the wonderful claims he (and his sucker followers) made in archive.org.
- Simplex solutions - built a large number of poor quality EDA tools (poor because they never got adopted and so never got the real bugs worked out and features required for real work) but looked very shiny, so were sold to cadence for a fairly large sum of money (relative to the low dev. cost). All but one of the simplex tools (now called cadence QRC) has been EOLd by cadence, and QRC will be thrown out just as soon as anyone cares enough to replace it with something better.
You can bet Tabula, if it succeeds at all, will be another failwin. It will be bought by one of Xilinx or Altera (the current FPGA duopoly), a couple of minor good ideas will be incorporated into future products and the overwhelming majority of the Tabula technology will be promptly forgotten. ...why? I hear you ask?
The reason is simple: Steve Teig has realized that "spamming" technology really does work (for him) - he has figured out that he can leave it up to much larger corporations to figure out, in their own sweet time, why 99% of his ideas sound great but are actually pointless, in the months and years after they are fooled into acquiring his techno-spam through an acquisition.
From one of his many online bios:
He holds over 220 patents. In 2002, he broke Thomas Edison’s record for the number of patents filed by an individual in a single year.
Enough said.
The disruption you mention almost happened in the early 90's. NeoCAD produced a compete competing tool chain for Xilinx FPGAs, including the place and route, for the then state-of-the-art 4000 series. Their software was better than Xilinx's, including things like a graphical layout editor. Xilinx was having none of it and bought NeoCAD. Quite a few NeoCAD features made it into the Xilinx software, eventually. Soon after that Xlininx started publishing less information on their FPGA's interconnect networks, and there has never been another attempt at writing such software.
Personally, I think writing a clone of the Xilinx software, today, is the wrong thing to do. It would be less effort to design and manufacture an "open source" FPGA, and write the necessary software from scratch, than to reverse engineer Xilinx's place and route.
How about audio processing? Are they any good at that? Because anything really customizable seems to cost an arm and a leg when it comes to musical gear. You could write a plugin for Audacity that interacted with it, maybe letting guys like me offload some of the processing on effects?
If there is one place that F/OSS could really take some serious marketshare it would be musical creation. Most of us musicians have no problem with tinkering, and as long as we can do cool things with it we don't mind if we have to get a little fiddly, and finally Audacity is already F/OSS and frankly is pretty kick ass, so there is already great software to plug these things into. If these chips would work good for audio I could see F/OSS DIY home studios becoming hot with musicians, especially seeing as how crazy the prices for some of the proprietary stuff is.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.