Amount of unwarranted bitterness in comments is quite amusing..
Since all are speculating whatever they want to prove their point, i decided to look up some info..
It seems Rigol developed 3 custom chips :
1. Active differential probe chip (one that goes inside probe). That is high frequency, analog chip
Active differential probes in GHz range cannot be discrete design.. This is their attempt to do it right. We will see if they were successful.
2. Scope front end chip. That is the chip that represent integrated input channel (analog part) together with attenuators.
Similar like above, front end of a scope channel on higher frequencies can benefit from integration.. So far all Chinese scopes were made from off the shelf parts in discrete SMD. This front end supposedly have capabilities to reach 4GHz. If true, using that chip will make 500 MHz scopes trivial.. You slap that on board and route it to A/D. Of course, we'll see how successful they were.
3. They developed fast 10GS/sec 8 bit converter with fast buffers at front (to ease driving of A/D) , A/D, and even some DSP on chip (probably some data shaping, filtering, corrections.....details are fuzzy)
So far all Chinese scopes used off the shelf A/D. Now they have one of their own. Even if it is not perfect, they can tweak it to perfection eventually. But so far, it looks like it's working well. Remains to be seen.
The architecture is completed by SPU (sampling processing unit) and WPU (waveform plotting unit). Those seem to be inside Zync. Or maybe SPU is separate chip. We'll see when Dave opens it.
SPU is quite complex , and has 2560 MB local waveform memory with claimed 32GBps bandwith. It also has Real time Fir filters, Hi res mode, Averaging, Sin(x)/x, interpolation, freq counter, triggering, protocol decoders, measure accelerator, and segmented mode capture all hardware accelerated.
In WPU and central control unit, FFT and math are running on CPU cores, accelerated by DSP accelerator.
By keeping that part of UltraVision II inside FPGA, they can fix bugs, add functionality and upgrade for new generations of products.
Their own front end and A/D chips will be probably cheaper that what they pay now, so they could use them on lower end.
At one point, when UltraVision II is proven to be functioning well and that they are happy with functionality blocks built in , they might even make an ASIC version of it.
As I said before, it remains to see how successful they were in achieving targets.
But to belittle huge effort it took to develop all this, it's just bad form.
These guys did huge techonological leap compared to what was state of the art for Chinese companies, only year ago.
Capabilites wise, it is better than many scopes out there. And if there are bugs, they will sort them out. You cannot upgrade 4 MS memory to 100MS with firmware update....
I cant wait to see what new Siglent will bring to the table. That will be interesting too.
As for the pricing, market will sort that out. I allready see Tektronix adjusting prices, rest will follow.
And yes, if it happens to be hackable, it will be best selling scope in history....