lets take this snip

my question as I am sure the author didn't have QUIK in mind when he wrote this article who besides QUIK are the competitors that are evolving in this direction. STM? INVN? INTC? QCOM? others?

No, thats why I put the article up as its not about QUIK at all, but it helps to understand what QUIK is doing.
Just as Rick says it the same as what INTC/Alters are doing but in a different place in the chain.

who besides QUIK

My own way to answer that question was to read very carefully over & over..S Johnsons great book...

Where good ideas come from.

http://www.npr.org/2014/06/27/322920914/where-do-good-ideas-come-from

So based on his work, if you look at it with his lens,

Who has low power FPGA on the bench...they have to have that,so take off STM,INVN, QCOM.

Lattice? Yes for sure. SoI tracked them very carefully and listened to the ccs for a while. No move to the FFE or something like it.

For me the CRUCIAL time was really 11-13 when they had to work, work, work and keep their lips sealed so that no one else did it at the same time.

Johnsons work also has great stuff on the multiples that have happened over and over, so I have tracked for the multiple- have not seen it yet.
INTC is more interesting with the ALtera move and they have been putting FPGAs with AP processors for some time, but not YET with ARM cores.

THe closest thing was the dual core ARM MCUs and MO in
front of an M4- but that is NOT near the same as the FFE in front of the ARM4.


So one conclusion is it possible that QUIK is kind of happy the way things have worked out? I think so.

11-13- an anxious time.

What did Dr Saxe say very recently from some of Bob W Qs....

here is the snip of the coversation

“Tim, late in the dialog, I thought you made a key point when you noted that

software offers a solutions to the power problem and needs to be at the table.

Do you think they had a clue?”

“No, and were just as happy they don’t.

I had hoped you would amply on that a bit.”

“We don’t like say a lot about that or what we’re doing.”

Now Bob W wrote it this way

software offers a solutions to the power problem and needs to be at the table.

but from Dr. Saxe's talks it resonated more for me if written this way.....

hardware offers a solutions to the power problem and needs to be at the table.

So, to conclude. I never use my lens, justmyopinion when looking at where QUIK stands.
I have used several others and S Johnsons lens of ideas from his book, Where Good ideas come from
has allowed a  look for competition in specific places
but it has NOT been forthcoming.

Now with the in house algo talent that
allows them to decide how to partition
between the hardware and the software
its really good.; it plugs into their roadmap...

So now that the S3 is almst reading material
what will the S4 be