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from the chip-manufacturer-manufactures-chips dept.
It's amazing the sources some journalists use to find leads. Oftentimes it's a LinkedIn profile where an engineer reveals an undisclosed product. But in this case, it's a shipping company.
The eagle-eyed folks at WCCFTech spotted something strange in the shipping manifests for Zauba, an Indian shipping firm. The entry is an AMD product codenamed "Magnum," with references to FPGA and DTV, two acronyms that don't usually go together.
The entry in question reads "PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD ASSEMBLY-AMD MAGNUM FPGA PROTOTYPEBOARD FOR DTV P/N .102-B25432-00 (FOC)."
Another clue from the manifest is that it originated in Canada. ATI Technologies, the GPU maker AMD acquired in 2006, was a Canadian firm and a great deal of GPU research and development is still done at the Markham, Ontario office. So this product was led by the GPU team, not the CPU team.
(Score: 4, Informative) by KilroySmith on Wednesday October 28 2015, @06:08PM
So AMD is working on a next generation DTV product (that happens, you know), and built a prototype that uses an FPGA rather than custom silicon (because, you know, an FPGA costs, like, dozens of dollars and is reprogrammable, where custom silicon costs millions and isn't), and had the prototype built in India. And the prototypes are being shipped to the engineering teams for development. Likely, the FPGA will be ditched for custom silicon when production occurs - if the volumes justify it.
This happens day in, day out, all over the globe with every engineering company in the world. We do it once or twice a year ourselves. This isn't news, and isn't any great insight other than "AMD is working on a DTV product".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @11:48PM
Exactly what I thought when I read:
FPGA and DTV, two acronyms that don't usually go together.
If it is something that we can't do with off the shelf parts or with a sufficiently powerful cheap microprocessor, then it is done with either an FPGA or custom ASIC. Either way, we're going to use an FPGA to test.