Re: internet-of-things (IoT) and FPGAs?
Any IoT chip will be an SoC / ASIC. An FPGA is simply too power hungry.
For IoT, you're certainly right. But IoT is the current buzzword to get people to read the press releases; it's going to become purloined to mean "smallish computer" once corporations realise how little sensor stuff they're going to selll...
FPGA are only for volume too low for ASIC or prototypes
Maybe. Back in the '90s, I was using SRAM-based FPGAs for video processing - a kind of reconfigurable coprocessor. It made the image crunching much more effective (at the cost of development effort, naturally). I'm rather looking forward to using these new Intel chips to do more of the same.
Now this is not necessarily tied to low-volume applications; the reprogrammability of the FPGA can be of use when you need many different operations to be availble from time to time. The NRE of ASIC goes up steeply with complexity, and the field-programmability of FPGA also allows for in-the-field upgrades. Whether a product makes sense in that situation depends heavily on what Intel produce, and at what price point. But it could be interesting :-)
Vic.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
