Comment Re:Summary (Score 1) 60
They give away Athlons for 10 bucks nowadays. If you could burn your custom asic into that, even if you wasted most of what used to be the Athlon; it would be fast as shit running your FPGA program natively. One you paid to lay it out, seems to me it might be cheap as shit to run a few thousand of them, and saturate the area with these detectors. Which feed already vastly condensed data that we would be capable of capturing.
That is just not how it works. You can't convert an athlon to a custom ASIC. The part that is the Athlon is the hardware.
To make a custom ASIC you need to make different hardware. That means making masks (cost a few million $), testing, making new masks, testing, running a batch, testing, testing testing.
With this batch size it isn't really interesting unless they need the additional speed ASICs bring.