About 25 years ago I did some work on Xilinx FPGAs. The hardware was nice. The ability to get them free (as a business development strategy) as a research user was nice [0]. The quality of the software stack was awful. The FPGAs were getting big enough that the synthesis process could need more 4GB of user memory, but the tools were barely functional on 64-bit systems of any sort, and this was far from the only problem.
It’s too bad that a vendor with only slightly worse hardware hasn’t eaten Xilinx’s lunch by having a genuinely pleasant development process. These companies aren’t selling synthesis tools — they’re selling hardware. Make the developers want to use it! (Intel, for all their faults, understands this.)
[0] It takes a special sort of incompetence to take 5 figures worth of fancy chips, stick them in a poorly packaged box, write only part of the address in it, and hope that FedEx will deliver it somewhere useful.
It’s too bad that a vendor with only slightly worse hardware hasn’t eaten Xilinx’s lunch by having a genuinely pleasant development process. These companies aren’t selling synthesis tools — they’re selling hardware. Make the developers want to use it! (Intel, for all their faults, understands this.)
[0] It takes a special sort of incompetence to take 5 figures worth of fancy chips, stick them in a poorly packaged box, write only part of the address in it, and hope that FedEx will deliver it somewhere useful.