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?
There are a large number of costs associated with a customer. Mainly it
is in the support, but there is also the cost of the tools which must be
spread over all customers. They learned a long time ago that it is
better to make each customer pay equally for the tools and keep that
cost out of the chip price as much as they can. Otherwise they favor
the small customers over the large ones. It is the large customers that
make money for them.
> > > 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.
Maybe not brick and mortar, but you can buy FPGAs from Digikey which is
not much different from any other online retailer.
--
Rick "rickman" Collins
[email protected]
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.
Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and
FPGA design URL
http://www.arius.com
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