[Thimothy]

When Intel acquired Altera, they scrapped the old catalog of Altera FPGAs. A few corps I was working with, who had heavy lock in to Altera due to those FPGAs, got royally screwed (had to suddenly redesign, and re-certify a bunch of boards that they where selling to happy costumers). Of course they went with Xilinx at the redesign, because f*ck you, and it didn't hurt that the SoC offerings of Xilinx where very superior at the time. I don't think it was a cost reduction issue, Altera was selling those old FPGAs at a BIG markup.

The amount of market I saw dissolve for Altera in a puff was incredible. To this day one of the most shortsighted corp decisions I have ever witnessed.

[rcxdude]

yeah, FPGAs are commonly used in market segments which value long-term availability and support of components (>10 years at least). Definitely not something to churn like consumer CPUs.