[huntero]

As a long time Altera user, one of the biggest things that made me want to jump the fence to Xilinx was the MUCH stronger community and hobbyist uptake. Xilinx benefitted from a ton of people out there educating others on their behalf.

Trying to shrink that community seems like a pretty obvious error. The closest thing the Altera world ever had were the old Altera user forums, which were a gold-mine. Intel shut them down immediately on acquisition. I guess it's AMD's turn.

[hardolaf]

As someone who actually worked for one of the largest FPGA consumers in the world, Xilinx didn't benefit at all from the community and hobbyist uptake. It was just an unnecessary expense and distraction that got in the way of their core mission. Around 5-10 companies make up around 70% of all FPGA silicon sales and the single largest end user is the U.S. Government and its customers (NATO members, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc.). Now that cloud took off, FPGAs are somewhat more used in cloud deployments but usually as a stopgap measure until an ASIC can be developed. And putting the lines on the football field has finally stopped being one of the largest consumers because the broadcasters finally learned that they can load new programming onto the FPGAs instead of just ordering new hardware every time something changes.

[imtringued]

They will notice their mistake once the hiring pool dries up.

In the long run they will be replaced by more competitive companies like Efinix.