Tabula. (FPGA start up)
in [FPGA]
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From: jacko on 2 Mar 2010 16:22 On 2 Mar, 11:22, Symon <symon_bre...(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > This lot seems to be revealing a bit more about their stuff. > > http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14493616 > > http://www.tabula.com Looks interesting. Increasing transistor speed with lower power is advancing, but reducing interconnect R and C seems to be at a limit of copper thickness. The copper can be thickened up to limits. The flop 4LUT mux thing with is a 7LUT * 8 with simple time rotary mux may be. Then it's just lower interconnect density and length. Umm have to wait and see. cheers Jacko http://forum.nibzx.co.uk - general technical forum
From: -jg on 2 Mar 2010 16:28 On Mar 3, 12:22 am, Symon <symon_bre...(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > This lot seems to be revealing a bit more about their stuff. > > http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14493616 > > http://www.tabula.com Time will tell.... meanwhile, over in the other corners, anyone remember Triscend ? Well, others are having a crack at the same market, but slightly updated, for 2010. See Cypress PSoC5 (Data, no open samples yet) and the just unveiled Actel A2F200 (supposedly real silicon & Eval) These both bundle a FLASH Cortex uC with Analog and FPGA fabric. Sounds great on a marketing-lunch-napkin, but the fish-hook in this has always been price, and the conflict of constrain of Flash.Ram.cells. The sampling smaller sibling, the PSoC3 has moved to ~$20 in price indicators, and the A2F200 is showing ~$40 (no indications yet of the A2F060) You can get a choice of ARM core, for $1-$3, and a choice of CPLD- FPGA for $3-$6, so that single-package-premium really narrows down the customers. -jg
From: -jg on 2 Mar 2010 20:03 On Mar 3, 12:22 am, Symon <symon_bre...(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > This lot seems to be revealing a bit more about their stuff. > > http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14493616 > A better overview is here http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800599499_499495_NT_b33fb563_2.HTM Some of what Tabula say, reads more like a patent dance, than any technical explanation. So, it is locally 1.6GHz, with time-sliced threads. It might save Logic and routing, but it will have no config-memory saving, and it ADDS the complexity of rapid config multiplex. (not to mention power impacts) We already have Achronix climing 1.5GHz PLDs since 2008, and XMOS have 400-500Mhz hard-time-sliced cores shipping also. Tabula have some rather quaint terminology, as they try to spin what they do, but designers have always tried to do more serially & pipeline, to save resource, if they can. It seems their SW will do the 'thread slice & dice' for you, and that may be the critical point. If that works, and you can debug it, it could be useful. If it fails, it will fail in a tangle. -jg
From: Eric Smith on 4 Mar 2010 07:46 On Mar 2, 12:15 pm, Jonathan Bromley <jonathan.brom...(a)MYCOMPANY.com> wrote: > Nicely put, but that way lies stagnation and the > ultimate death of our industry. I wasn't suggesting that it is completely impossible to outrun the steamroller, but if you want a much better chance of doing it, you should try running in a different direction than the steamroller is going. If you are only slightly off the path of the steamroller, maybe it will shift its path a bit to follow you, and maybe not. If your path is significantly different from that of the steamroller, there's a better chance that it will ignore you. Other than AMD, the companies that have any success selling x86 processors are targeting niches that Intel didn't focus much effort on, rather than trying to compete with Intel's mainstream parts. Most of them are targetting embedded and low power designs, where Intel's offerings were traditionally weak, though Intel seems to have become much more interested in those in the last few years. Many of those companies, including the one my friend worked at, started their x86 designs with the intent of competing at the high end, and ultimately realized that they couldn't. If you're going to compete with big FPGA vendors, there had better be something that your FPGA is *significantly* (not just slightly) better at than their parts. Whether Tabula's stuff is sufficiently better remains to be seen. > there's no point in creating something that's 10 times as good as > the competition, when something 1.5 times as good > will make you rich. If you're one of the big players, 1.5 times better might be good enough to gain you a bit of market share, but it rarely is sufficient for a startup to gain traction against the big guys. And startups that plan on being 10x better are often not even 1.5x better by the time they ship product. Successful startups usually have something that is *many* times better than the existing products, on some axis almost entirely orthogonal to the prior metrics. Eric
From: rickman on 4 Mar 2010 18:06
On Mar 2, 2:28 pm, Eric Smith <space...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Reminds me of some of the players that tried to compete with Intel on > high-end x86 processors. Only AMD has been successful at that. You call that success??? AMD is losing money hand over fist and there is no relief in sight! At one time they played leap frog with Intel in terms of who had the fastest parts, bragging rights and therefore higher average selling prices. But AMD has been sucking wind for more years than the cycles used to take. They are a full generation of process technology behind. They had to sell off their fabs to raise cash to stay afloat. Unless AMD has some really big trick up their sleeve (something better than a one time payment from Intel which makes up for maybe one year's losses) they are going to go the way of Zilog. Personally, I don't see them surviving, at least well enough to actually make an impact in the market. Intel may keep them around just to keep the FTC off their aggressive and illegal pricing backs. Rick |