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by hajile 2062 days ago
Codecs are a great example.

Let's say the current zen 2 had an FPGA onboard. AMD could sell you an upgraded design with AV1 support for a few dollars. Most people aren't going to buy a new CPU on the basis of a video decoder, but they'll buy an upgrade to the chip that auto "installs" itself. That's a sale AMD otherwise wouldn't have made.

1 comments

Except the new codec won't fit into the FPGA they put on that chip that's in the field.
The codec is gonna get nowhere near to filling a "CPU-class" FPGA, so if anything you get fewer parallel instances of it.