No, it's just all of the device models. Even the OSS tools take up almost 20 GB of space once you get all of the suppported device models which is not many compared to what Vivado supports.
As someone who actually worked for one of the largest FPGA consumers in the world, Xilinx didn't benefit at all from the community and hobbyist uptake. It was just an unnecessary expense and distraction that got in the way of their core mission. Around 5-10 companies make up around 70% of all FPGA silicon sales and the single largest end user is the U.S. Government and its customers (NATO members, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc.). Now that cloud took off, FPGAs are somewhat more used in cloud deployments but usually as a stopgap measure until an ASIC can be developed. And putting the lines on the football field has finally stopped being one of the largest consumers because the broadcasters finally learned that they can load new programming onto the FPGAs instead of just ordering new hardware every time something changes.
> No. I said the low-end of FPGA sales is getting eaten by microcontrollers and the high-end of FPGAs sales is probably about to get eaten by custom ASICs.
You have absolutely no idea what an ASIC costs compared to a FPGA. A FPGA that can compete with a tinytapeout chip costs a few dollars at most in extremely low quantites. Something high performance would need probably TSMC 12nm or similar at a minimum. At that point, you're talking $1M+ between licensing fees and direct costs to just go on a shuttle. If you want to make your own higher volume run or can't wait for shuttle spot, you're looking easily $5-10M minimum for your first 6 wafers. Comparatively, FPGAs competitive with TSMC 12nm run from a few hundred dollars up to several thousand dollars each. So for low volume, they're very competitive.
Both SystemVerilog and VHDL have AMS extensions for simulating analog circuits. They work pretty well but you also pay a pretty penny for the simulator licenses for them.
I use AI for side projects because Google gives me a stupid large number of tokens that refresh every 6-24 hours on my existing $10/mo Google One plan. I see it as my civic duty to help increase their costs by producing slop that I generally throw away anyways because it doesn't actually work after it gets generated.
At work, I was told to use AI but it doesn't actually work for anything that I couldn't have handed off to a brand new undergraduate intern. So I use it for things that I don't care about then go spend twice as long rewriting what it output because it made the task longer by being wrong.
In my systems, I just go to an error log that gets posted to a Slack channel then go to the the log file and grep for full message that got dumped to Slack. That then gives me everything that happened before and a state dump after. That state dump can be given to a program to tell us if any state errored and what happened before tells us what the expectation was and what the precise error was. Using a LLM would just be slower and more expensive for this.
I can't get an LLM to properly handle analyzing a single 200K+ line log without making things up so whatever anyone is saying about this "working" is probably a lie.
Heavy rail and light rail costs are very comparable unless you want to bury them. But it doesn't matter which you bury, they still cost about the same.
I also live in Chicago but unlike you, I have musculoskeletal issues that can be minor to the point of not noticing or to the point of it being painful to walk more than 2-3 blocks at a time. So doubling the distance between blocks would be the difference between me being able to use the bus and me needing to drive or use the far more expensive for taxpayers paratransit service.
And beyond that, the 6% of average time savings seen in studies of similar systems would be about the same improvement as adding curb bump outs which would save the bus time by not needing to repeatedly merge back into traffic. And that work is already happening across the city without inconveniencing anyone or causing users with disabilities from being discriminated against by armchair urban planners.
Visa and MC were capped at 0.5% for the network before that change went in as well. But we have no idea what actual rates were beside the cap as they were negotiated with each card issuer based on their risk profile and customer base.
Yeah they're not really putting out new exciting technologies. But this is cheaper than every other equivalent solution on the market for sale today in the USA.
I tried out Netgear Orbi and I don't know who it's actually for. It tried deploying it at my dad's place, but had to return it because it just doesn't work. Dropped in Ubiquiti gear to replace it and I had the entire network up and running within 15 minutes of applying power. And it's had zero of the issues that I had with Netgear's system.
I haven't really seen cheaper overall solutions for medium-sized home deployments than their gear. I need a layer 3 switch with 1 SFP+ 10Gbe port, and at least 5 1/2.5/5/10 Gbe copper ports with POE++ on at least 2 ports. I cannot find a cheaper solution that the USW-Pro-XG-8-PoE from any vendor. If you know one, please let me know.
Sure some of their hardware is overpriced, but they're pushing the limits of what's available in the 10 and 25 Gbe areas at relatively reasonable prices.
The corollary to them just working is that if they don't, they don't just ignore you like Apple. I reported a bug between two pieces of their hardware when talking to a specific 5Gbe NIC via their support without a support contract. They took a week to get back to me with a member of their QA department talking directly with me and having me validate beta firmware with them. After about a week of back-and-forth, they had a fixed version that has been deployed globally to everyone.
Meanwhile, Apple still hasn't fixed bugs that I reported to them between 2012 and 2014 while working for one of the largest universities in North America as a level 2 tech.
> What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do?
They quit when the numbers don't match what they feel they are worth. You see the same thing in finance. One bad year can send 20-30% of your workforce walking out the door in a matter of a few months post bonuses.
I'm what most people call a FPGA Engineer though I work all the way from boards/silicon to cloud applications. The number of times I've been asked to consult on something in the software world on performance, where the answer to how to do it write was me telling them "rm -rf $PROBLEMATIC_CODE" and then go rewrite it with a good algorithm, is way too damn high. Also, the number of times someone asked me to accelerate something on an FPGA only for me to go implement it run on a GPU in about 2-3 days using SYCL + OpenCL is insane. Sure, I could get another 2x improvement... or we can accept the 1,000x improvement I just gave you at a much lower price.