In engineering you are cautioned against making sweeping generalizations based solely on personal observations. You try not to equate anecdotal statements with test results and you really try not to make universal pronouncements based on a handful of data points.
That said, and given the fact that you have found your way onto the pages of the element14 community created for Altera’s new Cyclone IV series of FPGAs, I thought it would be interesting to conduct a highly unscientific survey of how the technical press has covered the Altera product launch.
First a bit of background and methodology. As belts have tightened there’s been plenty of discussion about the state of the electronic design media, much of it centered on how online publications are replacing print magazines. With industry media contracting alongside ad budgets, fewer and fewer pages are available in print vehicles and more emphasis is being placed by publishing companies on their web-based properties.
As such it made sense to base my Cyclone IV coverage survey solely on web-based entities—effectively eliminating ‘we didn’t have enough space to run a story on Cyclone IV’ as a viable excuse. The rest was simple: I went to the content search engine of each online publication aimed at EEs and typed in “Altera Cyclone IV”. Here are the results:
We’ll start with those sites treating the product launch with “benign neglect,” which is to say they ignored it. These include Electronic Design (ED), ECN (ECNAsia did run an edited version of the press release) and the ProgrammableLogic Zone of the site En-Genius.
Why nothing at all on these sites? Dunno. It’s a question I suspect is being asked by Altera’s corporate communications people and it can be answered only by the editorial leadership of these publications.
Moving up the ladder I came across a spate of websites that reproduced the Altera press release more or less in its entirety. This is not an exhaustive list, because after reading the same words time and again I was starting to feel as if I’d fallen into the movie “Groundhog Day”. Among those doing the cut and paste polka were FPGACentral, Digitimes (Taipei, ROC) and two publications based in Europe, ElectronicSpecifier and Design and Reuse.
Next up are the press release massagers, whose editors read through the press release, removed the quotes and adjectives and converted the remainder into the product coverage style of their individual publications, without adding comment. These websites include Chip Design, Electronic Products, EE Times and its subsets ProgrammableLogic Designline and EE Times Europe, FPGA Blog, EmbeddedSystemsNews (which also ran the complete, unedited press release) SoCcentral and in Europe, Electronic Product News.
Three sites offered commentary on the Cycone IV product introduction. Kevin Morris of FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal wrote that he suspects Altera felt market pressure to produce a sequel to its 65nm Cyclone III family that would compete more favorably with Xilinx's Spartan-6. Morris pointed out that Cyclone IV GX only boosts the number of logic elements from, at most, 150K (Cyclone III) to 200K and said “that's odd, isn't it? Usually a new family has a big density increase, like... double. What's up with that?”
Clive Maxfield of TechBites, a relatively new site featuring a large number of communities, offered an interesting lead, giving a nod to Robert Duvall’s famous line in the movie Apocalypse Now (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”). Maxfield’s version: “I love the smell of fresh silicon chips in the morning,” he wrote, adding, “so I was delighted to hear that the folks at Altera have announced their Cyclone IV FPGA family (production shipments will start in Q1 2010), which adds support for mainstream high-speed serial protocols while offering an optimal balance of low cost, low power, and a rich supply of logic, memory and DSP capabilities.” Maxfield also included application examples such as that of consumer video displays, in which an ASIC or a high-end FPGA can now be replaced with a Cyclone IV GX device.
Last but most, the halo for best effort goes to EDN Executive Editor Ron Wilson. In his EDN.com blog “Practical Chip Design” Wilson admits “it's not often that a simple product-line extension makes it over the threshold into newsworthiness here,” and he goes on to make the case that one can read more into the Cyclone IV launch than merely another product introduction, as stated in his headline: “Altera Cyclone IV parts signal direction of the global-recession industry.”
What is more, Wilson sought out Altera Senior Product Marketing Manager Umar Mughal to obtain additional information on power consumption and other chip details (the only Altera source quoted in the press release was Vince Hu, Vice President of Product and Corporate Marketing).
Conclusions? These days media coverage of a product announcement can be wildly unpredictable, much like the price of sushi-grade tuna at your favorite local restaurant. Clearly the days are gone when a chipmaker could issue a press release, have it automatically picked up and discussed at length by seasoned editors representing a wide range of interested media and as a result have the product become a topic of discussion by design engineers gathered around the coffee truck in the company parking lot.
Since it is not at all certain that the traditional industry media will snap back with the economic recovery it seems to me that there is room for —and a continuing need for-- sites such as element14.
Do you agree?