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AMD acquires Xilinx

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gnuarm:

--- Quote from: peter-h on April 15, 2021, 06:28:02 am ---I can tell you that "total determinism of FPGAs" is fiction :)

It is close, if designed correctly, paying lots of attention to sync clocking etc, but it is easy to generate a design which is temperature-marginal, metastable, etc.

There is no fundamental difference between complex logic in hardware, and software. There are just different ways to screw up :)
--- End quote ---

Maybe you have been smoking a bit too much of the wacky weed?  I literally have no idea what you are talking about.  Metastability is so easy to avoid.  In fact, it is often not even a problem to begin with unless your design is running close to the limit of the FPGA delays on the path of interest.

i don't know what you are talking about temperature marginal.  You mean the timing fails when the device runs warm?  There is no reason for that unless the tools fail to properly analyze timing... or you just don't run timing analysis. 

Anyone can be a bad designer I suppose is what you are saying.  My experience is that with MCUs designers attempt to manage potential failures, but often they are not recognized up front.  With HDL the various failures (other than just not designing the right logic) are much fewer and easier to avoid.  Even errors in logic are not hard to find if you do a proper job of validating the design.



--- Quote ---FPGAs are ever so tempting for many projects because you can go for a "direct solution" whereas with software you often have to use imagination (clever use of timers, etc). But you pay for that dead-end development route afterwards, with dead-end tools which go unsupported after a year or two, and a project nobody can pick up.

I don't know what the current Xilinx tool licensing is (it isn't dongles anymore) but if they use FlexLM that is a nightmare.

--- End quote ---

Again, I have no idea what you mean about "dead-end tools".  HDL is not tied to a specific tool.  Just like compilers synthesis software isolates the language from the target.  There is little reason today to write code with special features that require specific tools for implementation. 

I just don't know what your issues with FPGAs and the tools are based on, but it must have been some horrific adventures at some point in the past.

daqq:

--- Quote from: peter-h on April 15, 2021, 06:28:02 am ---FPGAs are ever so tempting for many projects because you can go for a "direct solution" whereas with software you often have to use imagination (clever use of timers, etc). But you pay for that dead-end development route afterwards, with dead-end tools which go unsupported after a year or two, and a project nobody can pick up.
--- End quote ---
Are you quite sure about that? HDL is far more portable than 'cleverly used timers' between various vendors. And please note that 'using your imagination' occasionally translates into 'Create a Rube Goldbergesque mechanism where the five timers are used in conjunction with the DMA, USART and SPI set to an obscure setting and connected externally'.

As to unsupported tools... where? You can download up to date tools that will open ancient projects or download the ancient tools. Sure, not every tool in FPGAland is perfect and Xilinx are a bit dickish about updating their tools for their older devices (meaning series 6 since series 7 came out ~10 years ago), but there are other vendors out there who have the equivalent stuff.

edit: And dropping support for a tool after a year or two after it came out has been my experience with MCUs rather than FPGAs. I'm sure that it can happen, but it's rare on both fronts.

Could you please tell me what kind of project traumatised you to this level against FPGAs? Was it recent or are you just comparing the state of the FPGA tools from 20 years ago to the state of the MCU tools today?

filssavi:

--- Quote from: peter-h on April 15, 2021, 06:28:02 am ---I can tell you that "total determinism of FPGAs" is fiction :)

It is close, if designed correctly, paying lots of attention to sync clocking etc, but it is easy to generate a design which is temperature-marginal, metastable, etc.

There is no fundamental difference between complex logic in hardware, and software. There are just different ways to screw up :)

FPGAs are ever so tempting for many projects because you can go for a "direct solution" whereas with software you often have to use imagination (clever use of timers, etc). But you pay for that dead-end development route afterwards, with dead-end tools which go unsupported after a year or two, and a project nobody can pick up.

I don't know what the current Xilinx tool licensing is (it isn't dongles anymore) but if they use FlexLM that is a nightmare.

--- End quote ---

Even the free version of vivado (I dont know intel tools but i suspect it it the same)  allows you (and it is actually configured by default) to perform timing analisys in all corners of the PVT space, so if you use the tool correctly it will find the timing violations. Of course if the design is poor with wierd unconstrained CDCs or large use of asynchronous logic for example you might have timing problems, but that is neither the FPGA nor the tools fault.

Now if you put softcores inside the FPGA, you might have some non deterministic behaviour if the code to logic interface is not extremely well designed, but that is not the logic's fault

TMM:

--- Quote from: srb1954 on April 13, 2021, 09:19:44 am ---
--- Quote from: gnuarm on April 10, 2021, 02:35:50 pm ---
--- Quote from: RoGeorge on April 08, 2021, 11:24:33 pm ---Wow!  Looks like soon all the chip manufacturers will become a single company.

Does this type of merges/acquisitions happen in other industries, too?

--- End quote ---

Ever hear of a little company called General Motors?  How about Fiat Chrysler Automobiles/Stellantis?  The UK had over a dozen car companies before WWII, but ended up with just two or three, I couldn't keep track.  Other than Rolls and Bentley I'm not sure they have any now... opps, Rolls is owned by BMW and Bentley is owned by VW.  Oh, well.

--- End quote ---
Morgan is still independent and Aston-Martin is semi-independent of the global conglomerates.

--- End quote ---
Mercedes-Benz is set to own 20% of Aston Martin, and the cars already use Mercedes-Benz engines/driveline and infotainment among other things if I'm not mistaken. Pretty inevitable in an age where cars are becoming a smartphone on wheels and the profit margins are ever smaller, even on a luxury car.

gnuarm:

--- Quote from: TMM on April 15, 2021, 10:58:03 am ---Mercedes-Benz is set to own 20% of Aston Martin, and the cars already use Mercedes-Benz engines/driveline and infotainment among other things if I'm not mistaken. Pretty inevitable in an age where cars are becoming a smartphone on wheels and the profit margins are ever smaller, even on a luxury car.

--- End quote ---

You don't know the half of it.  I have a Tesla model X and the durn thing is worse than my cell phone with features constantly appearing and disappearing, UI changes and just plain not working very well since nearly everything in the car is a "beta" feature.  I think my cell phone is actually less disruptive.  At least I can google to find how to fix the issues in my phone.  I can google from the car (even if it is slow and clumsy) but there are never fixes, just commiseration.

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