With respect to tooling, I believe the work on Lattice ICE40 will be an inflection point.<p>Consider: open tooling drives user device adoption, which in turn drives tooling refinement. At some point people working on the tooling are going to have ideas that simply didn&#x27;t happen, or gain management support, in the commercial side.<p>Now if this enables some advancement that that suddenly makes ICE40 devices more appealing in end products, then Xilinx and Altera are going to be on the outside looking in. If further, Lattice watches what&#x27;s happening and develops a hardware enhancement that accelerates&#x2F;reduces power&#x2F;etc. whatever development has happened on the open tooling side, this will further entrench their style of FPGA architecture.<p>For example, I am certain that the openness of Linux has essentially killed the search for new &quot;process models&quot; on both the software and the hardware side. (Think address space structure, and mmu design.)<p>However, if we are realistic, the web paradigm makes very few architectural requirements. Somebody, anybody, can re-architect the stack from the moment a GET request hits a NIC to provide whatever the existing mass of cruft on x86 systems provides probably for far less cost, far more performance, and far better efficiency.<p>The question then becomes, who are you doing it for? If it&#x27;s for customers, and you require them to use specialized tools, then they&#x27;re always going to whine about lock in. (There are ways to solve this problem, but this is already getting rather long.) So the only hope is that you build an app that leverages your infrastructure that no one can clone without a greater investment in traditional tooling.<p>This is all just a long winded way of saying that I do believe that there is something &quot;out there&quot; in having open FPGA tooling. The time is right. I see a lot of future in SoCs with integrated FPGA fabric featuring open tooling.<p>Personally, I&#x27;d love to see something like an ARMv8-M Cortex-M7 core(s) + FPGA. Do your general purpose stuff on the micro-controller, and accelerate specific tasks with dynamic reconfiguration of the fabric.<p>What is going to happen, however, is Intel will release a massive, overpriced, Xeon with an inbuilt Altera FPGA and only the likes of Google and ilk are going to be able to afford to do anything with it.<p>Here&#x27;s hoping though. I have belief in the Chinese!