I see this sentiment sometimes, but don't buy it. What I do buy is that customers, as well as investors expect the company to keep developing new products, create new releases and version. To drive sales.
Companies don't build things to motivate having developers - Remember they are the "cost center", while sales are the creators of value. The developers are a necessary burden and would be axed as soon as they don't provide what is needed.
Old products are boring. New products are interesting. Customers likes new thing. Media writes about new things, even writes negatively if updates are slow to come.
Compare to cars, skis, tennis rackets even dishwashers, new coke, new christmas special of somesuch not the same as last Christmas. Things that have new models every year or season, every six months etc. We create newness, not because it is really needed, but it drives sales.
Moving to a once a year makes Apples products guaranteed to get buzz, sales repeatedly. And investors can predict when that will happen. All are happy. Almost.
I believe that sentiment to some extent. As soon as you establish an org, they will keep generating projects for themselves. Almost no manager will tell you that their work is complete and it is time to downsize their team. If you have an UX team with N people, the team will make sure to generate workload for N people, probably even more.
On top of that, managing a huge redesign is a great career opportunity for everyone involved. The incentives are simply stacked in favor of doing redesigns for their own sake all the time. You need a clear minded top level manager to stop these kinds of ideas.
I need evidence that sufficiently large organisations don't eventually devolve into… whatever that is. And then, names, so I can apply there, while there's still some work ethics left in me.
The book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir this is exactly what they do - have a layer of the bacteria (which is integral to the plot) between the hull and where the humans lived.
Does this mean in a general sense there are numbers that are harder to factor, or is it due to constraints? That some keys will be much harder to crack? If so, how can we know beforehand?
Yes, profit depends on scale. But far from everything sells in millons of units, and scale is not everything. Mobile base stations sells i thousands and sometimes benefit from ASICs. But the ability to adapt the base station due to regional requirements and support several generations of systems with one design makes FPGAs very attractive. So in this case, the scale make FPGAs a better fit.
With a 90% to 95% reduction in performance [0], I'd be interested to know when these "generational" upgrades are worth the hit, since it seems like you're already going back a few generations.
I'll admit I'm not familiar with the processing requirements of basestations, but the prospect of mass-produced FPGA baseband hardware still seems dubious to me, and I can't find conclusive evidence it being used, only suggestions that it might be useful (going back at least 20 years). Feel free to share more info.
The ability to optimize the memory access and memory configuration is sometimes a game changer. And modern FPGA tools have functionality to make mem access quite easy. Not as easy as a MCU/CPU, but basically the same as for an ASIC.
I would also question the premise that mem access is less tedious, easy for MCUs/CPU. Esp if you need determinstic performance and response times. Most CPUs have memory hierarchies.
The more practial attempts at dynamic, partial reconfiguration involves swapping out accelerators for specific functions. Encoders, fecoders for different wireless standards, Different curves in crypto for example. And yes somebody has to implement those.
HLS is not good, so I don't know what you are referring to as "modern." I am primarily experienced with large UltraScale+ and Versal chips - nothing has changed in 15 years here.
> basically the same as for an ASIC
What does this even mean, specifically? Use RTL examples. ASIC memory access isn't "easy," either (though it is basically the "same.")
> partial reconfiguration involves swapping out accelerators for specific functions
Tell me you've never used PR without telling me. Current vendor implementations of this are terrible (with Xilinx leading the pack.)
Yes you can control the seeds and get determinstic bitstreams. Depending on device, tools you can also assist the tools by providing floorplanning constraints. And one can of course try out seeds to get designs that meet results you need. Tillitis use this to find seeds that generate implementations that meet the timing requirements. Its in ther custom tool flow.
You also need to bring time to market, product lifetime, the need for upgrades, fixes and flexibility, risks and R&D cost including skillset and NRE when comparing FPGAs and ASICs. Most, basically all ASICs start out as FPGAs, either in labs or in real products.
Another aspect where FPGAs are interesting alternatives are security. Open up a fairly competent HSM and you will find FPGAs. FPGAs, esp ones that can be locked to a bitstream - for example anti-fuse or Flash based FPGAs from Microchip are used in high security systems. The machines can be built in a less secure setting, and the injection, provisioning of a machine can be done in a high security setting.
Dynamically reconfigurable systems was a very interesting idea. With support for partial reconfiguration, which allowed you to change accelarator cores connected to a CPU platform seemed to bring a lot of promise. Xilinx was an early provider with the C6x family IRRC through company they bought. AMD also provided devices with support for partial reconfiguration. There were also some research devices and startups for this in the early 2000s. I planned to do a PhD around this topic. But tool, language support and the added cost in the devices seemed to have killed this. At least for now.
Today, in for example mobile phone systems, FPGAs provide the compute power CPUs can't do with the added ability do add new features as the standards evolve, regional market requirements affect the HW. But this is more like FW upgrades.
Companies don't build things to motivate having developers - Remember they are the "cost center", while sales are the creators of value. The developers are a necessary burden and would be axed as soon as they don't provide what is needed.
Old products are boring. New products are interesting. Customers likes new thing. Media writes about new things, even writes negatively if updates are slow to come.
Compare to cars, skis, tennis rackets even dishwashers, new coke, new christmas special of somesuch not the same as last Christmas. Things that have new models every year or season, every six months etc. We create newness, not because it is really needed, but it drives sales.
Moving to a once a year makes Apples products guaranteed to get buzz, sales repeatedly. And investors can predict when that will happen. All are happy. Almost.
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