Where is the market for Parallax FPGA products?
rjo__
Posts: 2,114
TChap @#63 http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/155083-Consensus-on-the-P16X32B/page4
This is true so why hasn't it happened? It is clear that Chip's capacity to design exceeds both Parallax's capacity to produce and the current market's capacity to absorb.
Dealing with the economics of the shifting sand is not an easy task.
I think this could change. A few years ago, Parallax tested the FPGA market and was not impressed. Should we see a major effort/paradigm shift toward FPGA-based products, which will allow Parallax to produce at nearly the rate that Chip can design?
Costs still get in the way of an FPGA effort, so you have to find important markets. Clearly education is one of those markets.
At least on the Altera side of the equation, the current players really struggle to both produce products and service those products. They don't answer questions.
I have several of their boards. They have remained almost useless to me, because I can't find a learning curve that makes sense and matches my other interests.
They aren't open.
Where are the other markets for which a Parallax based FPGA approach seems ideally suited?
Rich
What I see is an all or nothing mentality. I have been stuck there before. A product has to meet so many specs so nothing ever gets done and there is no middle ground. Big success for other micro manufacturers seems to built around flexibility, diversity, meeting many needs, not getting stuck on ONE product. Parallax may want to shake off the all or nothing mentality and think in terms of smaller incremental chunks. The money spent on the the Grand P2 may have already produced multiple interim products. A cheaper 2 core Prop would serve some needs in the market. A 32core may serve others. The Grand P2 may serve some needs but that is pending some design even still. All these years later and the conversation is on what ONE device to release? It should be on what 5 or 10 or 20 variations to release.
This is true so why hasn't it happened? It is clear that Chip's capacity to design exceeds both Parallax's capacity to produce and the current market's capacity to absorb.
Dealing with the economics of the shifting sand is not an easy task.
I think this could change. A few years ago, Parallax tested the FPGA market and was not impressed. Should we see a major effort/paradigm shift toward FPGA-based products, which will allow Parallax to produce at nearly the rate that Chip can design?
Costs still get in the way of an FPGA effort, so you have to find important markets. Clearly education is one of those markets.
At least on the Altera side of the equation, the current players really struggle to both produce products and service those products. They don't answer questions.
I have several of their boards. They have remained almost useless to me, because I can't find a learning curve that makes sense and matches my other interests.
They aren't open.
Where are the other markets for which a Parallax based FPGA approach seems ideally suited?
Rich
Comments
Selling FPGA based processors is a non-starter, the cost is too high.
My second favorite is… "Go where the competition isn't." I don't like competition, mostly because whenever I competed there was always someone capable of beating me.
When we first started out, I was very excited about the potential of a particular medical technology… I had read the science, stumbling on it by accident..
At the time we ordered our first unit, with money that we didn't have, the New England Journal of Medicine published a national survey study saying that Illinois would require about roughly 6 of the machines… total. Today, there are machines like that within 20 miles, everywhere in Illinois. The P2 could reduce the cost of those machines. It probably won't… I just give it as an example that I know to be true.
We have all seen those demonstrations of flocks of tiny quadcopters all cooperating to solve a task… what makes this possible is machine vision. There are cameras looking at the scene and coordinating the action. Why didn't they put the machine vision inside the quadcopters? Because they couldn't.
The P2 can do things that no other micro-controller can do right now. At least not at this level and at this cost. It was built to fly. Keeping it in FPGA form simply changes the size of the
motors and batteries:)
There are a lot of applications that are not cost sensitive and where power consumption is a non-issue.