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d-moon

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“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.” - Isaac Asimov

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I'm just waiting to see how they monetize their userbase. Last time I checked they made $1/user a year(~20m active users/ 20m revenue). It's predominately a whale market where traffic is driven by power users. You have mobile gacha games like Genshin Impact that make ~$10/user a MONTH (~5m active users/ 50m in monthly revenue)...

I wouldn't wait. fpgas weren't design to serve this model architecture. yes they are very power efficient but the layout/p+r overhead, the memory requirement (very few on-the-market fpgas have hbm), slower clock speed, and just an unpleasant developer experience makes it a hard sell.

Starcloud 1 year ago

- radhard electronics require a different sdk to maintain good seu/tid, and also require a higher layout overhead to maintain these metrics.

- radhard sdks aren't offered at sota node sizes.

- they are much much more expensive

If they can partner with a chipmaker (AMD :^)) and use that as a way to collect some meaningful data, that would be useful at the very least.

As someone who's worked at Xilinx before and after the merger, it's a surprise they were even able to sell it for that much. Altera has been noncompetitive to Xilinx in performance and to Lattice in terms of low-end/low-power offerings for at least the last 2 generations.

I'm concerned about the future of FPGAs and wonder who will lead the way to fix these abhorrent toolchains these FPGA companies force upon developers.