Well, the things are ~$1200 for 10, so someone's making money, I bet.

The last one looks a lot like the 'crazing' pattern on some famous Chinese pottery. It's a motif that shows up on some recent buildings, e.g. UC Berkeley's East Asian Library. So I would guess the Chinese Army/DoD made their pattern like that for pride purposes.

You'll be able to pack more Aebleskiver into your mouth now.

I'd say you have great friends.

North of $10K sounds about right. Awesome but expensive.

Well, sure, but I have no idea why you would want to pay for that privilege. The Zynq is in a totally different weight class: dual 800MHz ARM9, DDR2/3 interface, gigabit tranceivers, 1Msps ADCs. All this hardware to replicate the functionality of a 20MHz 8-bit AVR? Why?

An AVR core for FPGA already exists.

Yeah, going to optical when copper will do doesn't make economic sense. There's no need for the bigger bandwidth of optical as long as the transceivers are fixed and non-upgradeable, as they would be in consumer equipment. Even in the high-end space, there seems to be lots of 10GigE over copper these days.

I'll add that "science has generated net positive fusion" is not true. He's probably thinking of JT-60, which achieved conditions where, if deuterium/tritium (DT) had been used as the fuel, it would have meant breakeven. However JT-60 doesn't have tritium handling facilities, so they can only use deuterium and extrapolate to DT's higher cross section. Still, it's a remarkable achievement.

In my mind, the biggest obstacle to fusion power is finding/designing materials that will last several years in a commercial reactor. And we have hardly anything at the moment.

That's correct. I run in limited mode, and have a RunAs command set up for administrative tasks. It's not possible to copy/paste or drag between explorer windows started with different privileges.

I don't see this happening anytime soon. FPGA performance is nowhere near the $/performance ratio that would make sense for the consumer sector. Right now, FPGAs are doing what they've been doing for quite some time: custom logic or glue logic. I see the Atom+FPGA products as aimed toward the embedded space, where applications can benefit from hardware-deterministic timing and customizable interface logic; definitely not for number-crunching purposes.

And in general, FPGAs are only good at very repetitive tasks that can be effectively pipelined. You might have 600MHz performance on paper, but once your design gets complex, the on-chip routing starts to get taxed and becomes the bottleneck. Every successive generation of FPGAs improves on both logic and interconnect, but price/performance ratio and the limited number of applications preclude widespread adoption. And in the meantime, conventional CPUs and GPUs will continue to improve.

Sounds like they're pricing it close to actual cost.

You do realize that 75k puts one in nearly the top 10% of personal income, right? What are we supposed to do after we "wake up," go into finance?

I hate LabVIEW myself, but it's pretty entrenched in the non-EE engineering disciplines, and also to some extent in physics. NI is very good at selling things.

I don't think the collider/HEP folks have ever promised energy breakthroughs; that's not what they're interested in. Collider science is pure science.

The DOE fusion budget, on the other hand, has basically been falling monotonically since the 1970s.

Why'd you go with XMOS over, say, additional FPGA fabric?