Securing a Bright Future for FPGAs
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Abstract Four years ago, when the news of AMD acquiring Xilinx first became public, FPGAs were a rather hot topic. New reconfigurable chips being rolled out in the back-then latest fabrication technologies were promising such things as dramatic performance boosts in AI inference and fundamentally more secure hardware. Yet, in the second quarter of 2024, AMD reported a 41% drop in year over year revenue of its embedded division into which Xilinx was incorporated. This is in stark contrast with GPUs which were part of similar AI-related promises. Two major reasons for deflated expectations from FPGAs are 1) that FPGAs failed to transition to newer technology nodes in the four years that have passed, thus losing much of the competitive edge that they used to have for most of the XXI century and 2) that attempting to use an FPGA can still be a frustrating experience for domain experts.