AMD acquires Xilinx

[gnuarm]

In other news, AMD took a big step up today because a new analyst gave it a rating of "outperform".  Up nearly 6% dragging XLNX with it.  I own some Xilinx stock and find it funny that it trades consistently about $10-$14 below what it will be worth when the stock trade is consummated.  The share holders have blessed the deal, so I guess the only worry is the uncertainty of the AMD stock price at the point of closing.  Seems odd to me the gap is not narrowing any. 

[langwadt]

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

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.

Yes, Mercedes is extending its tentacles into Aston-Martin but they don't have a controlling interest over the company which is why I would describe Aston-Martin as still being semi-independent. The increasing usage of brought-in drive trains and infotainment systems is inevitable these days for small volume manufacturers as they don't have the financial and engineering resources to develop the very complex equipment demanded by today's market.

By the way Morgan have long used BMW drive trains in their cars but they still continue on their independent path with their idiosyncratic car designs.

Aston Martin has used Mercedes engines and other parts for a number of years now, before that they were owned by Ford. And you can clearly see that some Fords and Astons were done or at least inspired by by the same designer

[tszaboo]

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.

Wow, that is plain dangerous. They should not be doing that type of experimentation in the field. Would certainly drive me mad.

It is nice that they continually improve the car in many ways... all free.  But it's not so fun knowing that at any time features can change or even not work as well.  Mean while they have never gotten the automatic high beam control and the automatic wipers to work fully.  It's not like they designed these features last year.  After 8 years these things still work very marginally.  For the head lights I can take full manual control.  For the wipers the choices are automatic with manual override, or no intermittent wiper at all.  They don't have a knob on the wiper stalk to let you dial in the delay rate.  I guess they figured they would be able to make it work well.

Beams still not working properly? About 4 years ago, I was seriously missing a pump action shotgun from my car (unfortunately illegal in Europe) because a Tesla was driving behind me for about 20 minutes on a mountain road at night.
The company feels like just an experiment. With surprise bills for repairs, cars falling apart because they forget bolts, and most important features are fart sound easter eggs.

[Bassman59]

In other news, AMD took a big step up today because a new analyst gave it a rating of "outperform".  Up nearly 6% dragging XLNX with it.  I own some Xilinx stock and find it funny that it trades consistently about $10-$14 below what it will be worth when the stock trade is consummated.  The share holders have blessed the deal, so I guess the only worry is the uncertainty of the AMD stock price at the point of closing.  Seems odd to me the gap is not narrowing any.

I own both XLNX and AMD, and the other day I checked the XLNX price to see if it was near the tender offer price, and I was surprised to see it was not. (If it was, I was going to sell it.) So I'll just keep an eye on it. If it does hit or exceed the offer price, I'll sell. I remember that for the longest time I had TEK shares, and when they were bought by Fluke I figured I'd just let Fluke send me the money. Well, it turns out there was some bullshit fee associated with that, and the fee was greater than the commission had I sold. (Now of course there are no more commissions.)

Several years ago when NXP was on the block, I had shares, and I kept watching the news and the ticker price. The shares did reach the offer price, but there was concern that the sale would not go through, so I sold the shares and then when the deal collapsed the NXP price went down too.

[Bassman59]

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.

Funny, yesterday morning the boss came in and said, "something weird happened yesterday. I was doing some testing before buttoning-up the thing, and it was giving weird data. At first I thought, did you change the firmware?" Nope, same firmware that's been in it for a few weeks now, I'm gonna release it soon.

Turns out that the key words above are "before buttoning-up." In a proper installation the board with big FPGA is installed such that you put a silpad between the chip and the big cold finger the chip goes up against when the board is installed. if the silpad isn't there and the board isn't screwed into place, the FPGA gets warm. Warm enough to no longer meet timing.

[gnuarm]

Turns out that the key words above are "before buttoning-up." In a proper installation the board with big FPGA is installed such that you put a silpad between the chip and the big cold finger the chip goes up against when the board is installed. if the silpad isn't there and the board isn't screwed into place, the FPGA gets warm. Warm enough to no longer meet timing.

Sure, the temperature specs on FPGAs are junction temperature.  If you are running commercial temp range, if the junction gets out of that range the timing is not guaranteed.  No different from running your car with no coolant.  Not the car's fault and not the FPGA or tools fault.

20 years ago I was working on an Altera 10K design (I think that's what the chips were called).  It was actually an upgrade to test gear to add ATM, if I recall.  When they first worked that design they had trouble with timing as there was some disconnect in the tools or our timing constraints.  Altera would not help us with it so in the respin of the FPGA we had to do our own temperature qualification of the design.  We ended up running many iterations of the MAX+II tools with different seeds every night and testing them until we found one that worked.  They were planning to discontinue the tool, I think they didn't want to find any significant bugs that would need to be fixed.  They may have brought back the MAX+II tool later on, not sure why.

That was the only time in 25 years of working with FPGAs that I've seen that sort of a problem with the tools. 

[Bassman59]

Turns out that the key words above are "before buttoning-up." In a proper installation the board with big FPGA is installed such that you put a silpad between the chip and the big cold finger the chip goes up against when the board is installed. if the silpad isn't there and the board isn't screwed into place, the FPGA gets warm. Warm enough to no longer meet timing.

Sure, the temperature specs on FPGAs are junction temperature.  If you are running commercial temp range, if the junction gets out of that range the timing is not guaranteed.  No different from running your car with no coolant.  Not the car's fault and not the FPGA or tools fault.

Right .. remember the tools tell you whether the design will work over the stated temperature/voltage range.

They don't tell you whether your design will or will not work outside of the range. See, it might, or it might not ... so, you must assume that it won't.

And we proved that, hey, yeah, when it's outside of the temperature spec, it doesn't work.

And further is that you can never tell exactly what won't work outside of spec range. Do you feel lucky?

This is why I never overclock a CPU.