Steve wrote:

> 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?

I buy my FPGAs through a distributor. Not Altera direct.
Somehow it took me longer to grasp certain ideas.
I was talking on the phone with a FAE several times for
half an hour or so. This FAE is likely getting a bit more
than $5.95/hour. And this service somehow has to be paid.
The fewer chips a customer purchases the more expensive he
is, assuming the setup-cost per customer to be constant.
So obviously the lower the chip count the higher the prices.

Rene