Anyway, this question half me trying to figure out what FPGA maker/toolchain to go with and half me being curious about the industry and where it's going. If you have any insight, it would be cool to hear!
I don't really have any insight
, but I'll dump my thoughts here.
First of all, moore's law - most likely- is coming to an end and we're processing more and more stuff, e.g. Augmented reality stuff, Pokemon Go, Speech, AI, more video processing etc. So going for FPGAs is the right thing and I see all those ARM cores in mobiles, tablets, etc. getting 'FPGA-extensions' very soon (especially ZYNQ-like SoCs).
Not sure about how Intel will handle the situation with Altera, but they will have to come up with a toolchain that is pretty similar to what Xilinx is trying to push with their HLS and PYNQ stuff now- and I think this is because they're targeting all those ubiquitous gadgets more and more.
(See
https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/pynq/latest/pynq.pdf and
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://xilinx.eetrend.com/news/10408&prev=search ).
So clearly the intent is to get regular programming code, i.e. MATLAB, OpenCL, C++ and other stuff compiling/synthesizing to HDL or PL directly, as fast and as seamlessly as possible. Getting to interact PL with the CPU is also quite interesting, so Xilinx have switched to AXI (ARM standard) pretty early and they seem to have a clear path in mind.
I feel that Altera tools are a little behind in this regard, but Intel + Altera is a different beast now, of course. Personally, I think I'll stick with Xilinx, although, if you know your Verilog/VHDL you shouldn't have any problems just working with both. It'll probably waste time if you really should have to learn both, but wth.