[aylons]

Oh, yes. Hardware products and projects, specially those complex enough to need an FPGA, will usually have a long development pipeline and even one year seems pretty short.

And you can very often prototype with either an overpowered development board or you own prototype board with another FPGA, and then downsize appropriately as the project advances. Most importantly, if you know there will be a viable version in a year, you can postpone the final decision and Xilinx get to avoid having you choosing Altera now if it's possible that their new offering will match your project.

[willis936]

Do companies really gamble on their supply chain that hard?

[blihp]

They don't have a choice. FPGA's aren't like vanilla logic chips: they are highly proprietary both in terms of their specific hardware functionality as well as software tool chains and you can't second source them. Some of the larger customers are using them for government contracts (think military and space applications) where they are signing up products they are contractually on the hook for from years to decades.