Why do companies that make FPGAs like to price gouge so much?
They would sell a lot more if they were to charge a more reasonable price, like $100.
They are effectively creating their own issues and starting a price gouging cycle. They may charge a lot because they do not have enough customers, but the reason they do not have enough customers is because they are charging too much.
It is like those smaller stores that go out of business, they enter a cycle that drives them out of business as they see the number of customers dwindling and to compensate, they charge the remaining customers more to make up for the lack of customers, which ultimately causes more customers to leave.
OK, so let's take a high end FPGA of today:
"Xilinx’s ACAP portfolio will be initiated with TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing process, with the first tapeouts due in late 2018. Xilinx states that Project Everest has been a monumental internal effort, taking 4-5 years and 1500 engineers already, with over $1b in R&D costs. The final big chips are expected to weigh in at 50 billion
transistors, with a mix of monolithic and interposer designs based on configurations."
BTW a 28 core Xeon has 8 billion transistors. So this is 6 times as large, lot less yield, smaller market, interfaces that regular computers only can dream of. That's why it is expensive.
When making that main board, how do you reflow it, since both sides of the PCB have lots of parts? In other words, what keeps the parts on the bottom side from falling off during reflow?
Surface tension and glue.
i wonder what kind pc built you needed to run 4k in 2001 and was there even any games what had 4k resolution option?
I dont think it was impossible to drive this. I remember having 1600x1200 CRT monitors back in 2000, and this is just 4x the pixels. In 2001, there was for example the Matrox Parhelia 256MB, which was with freaking 256MB of memory (I had 1.2GB HDD back then) which had:
Maximum resolutions (per display) Digital, 1-2 monitors: 1920 x 1200
Joined graphics card mode enables an additional Matrox DualHead** or TripleHead† graphics solution to work in tandem in one system to drive up to four displays‡
DVI x 2
So yeah, it wastn that bad to drive a monitor like this. Two of that Matrox card actually has too much resolution avaliable