Hacker News Reader

Comment by whoisthemachine | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea Altera was worth that much... they always seemed like such a small-time company when we used their products in class.

View on HN

There is a thesis that FPGAs will take share from ASICs as upfront costs for producing ASICs continues to climb, seemingly in an exponential manner as feature size falls. Some Altera investors think the company is worth significantly more than $54 per share, given the market could become significantly bigger and the competitive dynamic is pretty nice for the two big players.

Certainly FPGA users see them as a distant second to Xilinx, but that may be why they need to be bought. Also, Altera is making 14mm parts at Intel's foundry which suggests they could integrate pretty easily with Intel's CPU products.

I don't know which FPGA users you're talking about. Huawei, one of the largest FPGA users in the world, has been buying from Altera for a long time now.

Altera's software is miles ahead of Xilinx's. And their hardware is pretty close, with Xilinx getting the edge.

>> Altera's software is miles ahead of Xilinx's.

Can you please expand on that ?

Also what about partial reconfiguration , isn't xilinx the leader ? isn't that important for general compute ?

By software I mean their place/route and synthesis tool, Quartus. The algorithms used in Quartus, based off of VPR (Versatile Place/Route) is the reason Altera is in the position they are now, relative to a decade ago when they were struggling quite a lot.

Place and route in digital circuits is an NP-hard problem. Xilinx solves this problem using analytical place and route (solving a giant system of equations), explained here a bit more: http://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/implement...

Altera's tool uses Simulated Annealing. Historically, Altera's tool has been faster and easier to use, allowing user's to implement larger designs and synthesize them quicker. However, I don't know the state of things RIGHT NOW, but I'm pretty sure this was the case 2 years ago.

Altera's chip design/layout is lacklustre compared to Xilinx's though.

Also, partial reconfig is a very important feature, but it's not used by all customers. Most people just want large FPGAs so they can fit large designs on them, have really fast I/O (Transceivers) and meet timing on their circuits.

I know xilinx created a whole new tools(which they releases a couple years ago), and [1] says they moved from simulated annealing. So at least according to the article, they aren't behind altera.

[1]http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20120501-bigdeal

I had no idea they were so widely used! My comment is very naive and unqualified, as I haven't done any digital design since my college days.

Quartus II is ahead of what Xilinx has to offer? Dear god. Xilinx offering must be truly horrible!

It is. As is everyone else's. Nothing sucks more than FPGA toolchains. It's hard for software people to understand what FPGA users have to deal with.

Here's a good thought exercise to help visualize the situation: imagine if Intel had insisted on keeping the x86 instruction set closed and undocumented, and, furthermore, that they had succeeded in doing so. For 30 years we've had nothing but proprietary Intel compilers. How much would life suck? How far behind would we be?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com