Quote from: rem26 on May 10, 2018, 04:03:02 PM

Quote from: s1gs3gv on May 10, 2018, 03:19:22 PM

Quote from: yrk1957 on May 10, 2018, 03:04:12 PM

I think you are not factoring in the cost of FPGAs.

That's a good point, but the FPGA market looks totally dis-functional to me. I suspect that pricing practices will change as the impact of the Intel/Altera acquisition works thru the system.

I doubt it. Altera/Intel have no desire to erode their margins, and there are a lot more high dollar uses for FPGAs than mining.... Most of the companies I've worked for will spend $50k-$100k per FPGA, for hundreds of engineers, to pull in an ASIC design schedule.

I think you're confusing markets. Traditionally, fpgas (other than tiny ones used in various devices) were only used for ASIC design. That's not the case any more. They're becoming legitimately their own product that can be used by a large number of markets. I for one am interested to see what they can do to speed up SQL servers. There are a number of big data / relational database FPGA solutions coming to market. The next couple of years are going to be very exciting for the fpga and server markets -- all that fpga power is going to be coming to our door. Just wait until the marketing guys figure out what they can do with FPGAs and how quickly they'll be able to do it... Alright, maybe this isn't a good idea at all Cheesy

Intel's only current coprocessor offering is the Xeon Phi. Intel is planning a hybrid fpga cpu. This would be like having a cpu with a gpu except it would be a cpu with a fpga. Their goal is to put a co processor on all the server chips. This would allow offloading of various applications that would have performance / efficiency increases at a multiple of a gpu -- and -- allow offloading of tasks you can't even do on a gpu. For higher end customers that need more fpga space, they'll have co-processor pci-e cards.

Even with the margin erosion, by increasing the market size, they will have far more profit than they could by price fixing. Intel sells 100s of M of chips every year. They have the ability to completely destroy Xilinx who has been stagnant, take almost complete FPGA market share, while, simultaneously taking market share from AMD and Nvidia. Brilliant! Intel could lose market cap that would be equivalent to 100% of Xilinx market cap and it would just be a "bad day". They're not in the same playing field.

Have you seen what they (Intel) decreased the price of proto chips to? I was pretty shocked. That's going to take a big bite out of Xilinx's 'entry fee' / 'cover charge'. In the next couple of years we'll be buying Stratix 10 PCI-E boards at walmart for $600 a pop.