Rene Tschaggelar <[email protected]> wrote in message news:<402405f0$0$714$[email protected]>...

> > I can understand that attitude for people buying ten thousand chips;
> > but where do you expect people to get the experience with FPGAs that
> > they have with microprocessors, when state-of-the-art FPGAs are two
> > orders of magnitude more expensive and an order of magnitude less
> > convenient to acquire?
>
> The cost is at the FPGA representative, distributing the stuff.
> They get the questions asked.


Xilinx have a revenue of $1.2bn according to this:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=xlnx

Are you seriously trying to say that the cost of an FPGA
representative being asked questions has anything other than a
negligible effect on the prices of FPGAs?



> > But, again, why doesn't the same argument apply to CPUs, for which
> > there are half a dozen distributors in most towns, fairly happily
> > distributing the things for a couple of percent profit margin.
>
> You say it. There are half a dozend shop selling cpus per town.
> You go there, get a cpu, no questions asked, no questions answered.
> They wouldn't be able to answer anyway.


You don't expect such shops to be able to answer your questions, but
the problem is that there just aren't any shops that you can buy FPGAs
from.


> There may be one FPGA representaive per state. And you ask a lot of
> questions. Not because you're more stupid than a cpu buyer, but
> because placing a cpu and applying an FPGA are completely different.


See above.


--
Steve