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The FPGA turns 40

The FPGA turns 40

2 comments

·June 20, 2025
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avidiax

FPGAs are an amazing product that almost shouldn't exist if you think about the business and marketing concerns. They are a product that is too expensive at scale. If an application takes off, it is eventually cheaper and more performant to switch to ASICs, which is obvious when you see the 4-digit prices of the most sophisticated FPGAs.

Given how ruinously expensive silicon products are to bring to market, it's amazing that there are multiple companies competing (albeit in distinct segments).

FPGAs also seem like a largely untapped domain in general purpose computing, a bit like GPUs used to be. The ability to reprogram an FPGA to implement a new digital circuit in milliseconds would be a game changer for many workloads, except that current CPUs and GPUs are already very capable.

Simboo

[dead]