Xilinx - the chip you finish writing yourself

The FPGA sits between the two options the making milestones describe. A general-purpose processor runs anything and is slow at specialised work; a custom chip is fast and costs millions to design and fabricate before a single one exists. A field-programmable device is bought as a finished part and given its function afterwards, which makes small volumes and changing requirements affordable.

That is why it appears in networking. Line-rate packet processing that has no volume to justify a custom chip - a specialised inspection function, a protocol nobody else implements, an accelerator whose specification changes each year - is FPGA work. The same property explains why network equipment vendors have shipped them for decades in products nobody describes as programmable hardware.

It also explains the acquisition. What AMD bought was the ability to put programmable logic next to its processors and the people who design the serialisers underneath fast interfaces, at a moment when the network adapter was becoming a computer of its own.