[HN Gopher] The FPGA turns 40
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       The FPGA turns 40
        
       Author : voxadam
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2025-06-20 23:19 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.adiuvoengineering.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.adiuvoengineering.com)
        
       | avidiax wrote:
       | 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.
        
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       (page generated 2025-06-23 23:00 UTC)