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If you understood FPGAs you wouldn't think of them as incredibly niche.

The more application specific you get, the smaller the total volume of chips. The very nature of application specifity ruins the economics of ASICs.

Every time someone tells me an ASIC is more energy efficient I'm thinking, you just ruined the business case. The vast majority of application specific designs are not economically viable unless you use FPGAs to implement them.

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> The more application specific you get, the smaller the total volume of chips

Sure, and that is the definition of niche. FPGAs are niche.

You could have made a good point that an application specific design that already requires an FPGA might want to now also have a local LLM, so putting the LLM right on the FPGA might be the most expedient option in that case.

Other than that, I don't think people are reaching for FPGAs to do LLM training or inference in general because I don't think it can be cost effective vs other options.

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