The apparent driver here isn’t about AMD wanting to get into the FPGA business. The real motivation appears to be a combination of platforms and programmable chiplets. There are two problems that programmable chips address https://semiengineering.com/amd-wants-an-fpga-company-too/
-SMIC is shipping 14nm finFETs, with a 7nm-like process in R&D.
-Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) recently entered the 3D NAND market with a 64-layer device. A 128-layer technology is in R&D.
-ChangXin Memory Technology (CXMT) is shipping its first product, a 19nm DRAM line.
-China is expanding into compound semis, including gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC).
-China’s OSATs are developing more advanced packages.
An expanding attack surface in hardware, coupled with increasing complexity inside and outside of chips, is making it far more difficult to secure systems against a variety of new and existing types of attacks https://semiengineering.com/hardware-attack-surface-widening.... Per Paul Kocher “AI will help attackers in a number of ways, where behaviors that used to be unique to humans can now be automated in ways that are lot harder to distinguish from humans"