Where is the Keysight Megazoom V ASIC?

[EEVblog]

I think Dave needs to have a real thorough search in the dumpster room, the Megazoom V could have slipped down behind a bin or something...

That does feel like where this is headed....

I can assure you I have not heard a thing.
And Keysight don't seem to hate me like Tek do 

[2N3055]

I think Dave needs to have a real thorough search in the dumpster room, the Megazoom V could have slipped down behind a bin or something...

That does feel like where this is headed....

I can assure you I have not heard a thing.
And Keysight don't seem to hate me like Tek do 

[EEVblog]

News on the a new Keysight scope they teased on their contest site has leaked onto their own website and dealers:



https://www.keysight.com/us/en/assets/3122-1256/product-fact-sheets/InfiniiVision-3000G-X-Series-Oscilloscopes.pdf

https://au.sports.yahoo.com/keysight-infiniivision-3000g-oscilloscope-now-130000442.html
https://docs.rs-online.com/1e26/A700000008467596.pdf



Sadly it's not the Megzoom 5 ASIC  It's just replaced the 3000T model with the 3000G
https://www.keysight.com/au/en/products/oscilloscopes/infiniivision-2-4-channel-digital-oscilloscopes.html

[TheSteve]

Runs the 3000t firmware, so pretty much a color change.

[tv84]

G = Grey 

[EEVblog]

G = Grey 

The 3000TG Tall Grey

[Fungus]

How do we register?

[Hydron]

How do we register?

First step: register as a business and get a VAT/GST number...

(I'm in theory kidding, but this is likely an actual requirement)

[tv84]

First step: register as a business and get a VAT/GST number...

... and reside in one of the "friendly" countries where the promotion is valid. Would love to hear about the reasons for such selection.

[2N3055]

First step: register as a business and get a VAT/GST number...

... and reside in one of the "friendly" countries where the promotion is valid. Would love to hear about the reasons for such selection.

I did actually get answer from Keysight on this question for my country. And in case of my country it isn't Keysight's fault, but my country that has retarded regulations.. In short, if you make a draw and send people stuff, that is basically considered lottery and they have to be registered as a company that does gambling and lottery and in Croatia..  Fun fact, if a citizen of Croatia applies online (or when traveling you buy lotto ticket) to online draw and win that is illegal. Not in a way you didn't pay taxes illegal. No, even if you want to pay taxes it is illegal...

Of course dodgy gambling sites don't care. But Keysight cannot ignore legislation....
I don't know about other countries though...

[Fungus]

... and reside in one of the "friendly" countries where the promotion is valid. Would love to hear about the reasons for such selection.

I heard it's forbidden here in Spain because it falls under gambling laws even though I'm not actually betting anything.

I have contacts in the UK so I no problem giving them a UK address. Probably have to fly over and pick it up in person after Brexit but I'll figure out a way for a $10,000 'scope.

[EEVblog]

Still waiting...

[Kleinstein]

I would not bet on a new ASIC.  The advantage of an ASIC over an FPGA is possibly lower power consumption at the same performance. However ASICs can not use the high end processes as FPGAs due to the very high mask costs. So the advantage is getting smaller and smaller - if there is any left at all.

If at all a ASIC would be thing for high volume, low cost solutions, or if there is no access to high end FPGAs but only cheap not so high end chips. This would not be KS, but more Rigol / Sigilent.

[AndyC_772]

I wonder whether, at at corporate level, the folks at Keysight are alert to the competition, which does seem to have improved significantly in the last few years.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/are-premium-scope-brands-still-justified/msg5454938/#msg5454938

[HighVoltage]

Still waiting...

It seems like the exiting days of Keysight are over.
- Very few youtube videos
- No more "Scope Month"
- Daniel is hiding
and so on ....

Maybe they are concentrating more on the high end UXR scopes.

I still love the Keysight scopes.
For one project I needed to decode the SENT protocol for the first time and the 4000x and the 6000x do a perfect job on that end.
So, Megazoom IV is still working well for my applications.

[jc101]

My biggest issue with Keysight is the move to renting the hardware features.

For example, the E36731A Battery Emulator and Profiler is a PSU and electronic load you can drive perfectly from the front panel. However, to use the Battery Emulation side, you need to obtain a licence for BenchVue, as it can only be driven from the PC. The licence is rented annually. You can also now get a node-locked permanent licence for an additional 30% on top of the instrument price to use a feature screen printed onto the front panel of the device.  You buy the hardware but can only use 2/3 of it until you pay them again for the remaining 1/3.  They would have sold one if it weren't for the ridiculous cost of the licence to be able to actually use it.

I love my Keysight 3000T.  It responds instantaneously to input and can decode almost anything I need to decode.

[Anthocyanina]

a few days ago Daniel shared on twitter a very zoomed in picture of an instrument's footy thing, https://twitter.com/DanielBogdanoff/status/1793780675319103801

my hypothesis is that it being all zoomed in might be a hint of Megazoom V

[nctnico]

I would not bet on a new ASIC.  The advantage of an ASIC over an FPGA is possibly lower power consumption at the same performance. However ASICs can not use the high end processes as FPGAs due to the very high mask costs. So the advantage is getting smaller and smaller - if there is any left at all.

Nowadays using a GPU for doing all the heavy lifting is a good choice for building a DSO. Performance, power consumption, production cost, software development cost and flexibility wise there is no match.

[2N3055]

I would not bet on a new ASIC.  The advantage of an ASIC over an FPGA is possibly lower power consumption at the same performance. However ASICs can not use the high end processes as FPGAs due to the very high mask costs. So the advantage is getting smaller and smaller - if there is any left at all.

Nowadays using a GPU for doing all the heavy lifting is a good choice for building a DSO. Performance, power consumption, production cost, software development cost and flexibility wise there is no match.

GPU is in a wrong place in a data graph to replace FPGA. Megazoom is ADC/trigger/sample memory part. GPU can handle screen rendering, phosphorus emulation, math and measurements acceleration etc. So it just makes application processor really fast, basically bringing processing power of PC scope into realm of embedded scopes.
But ADC-FPGA in front of it stays.

And even Keysights with Megazooms have FPGA too.. For accelerating and implementation of other stuff Megazoom cannot do.
So you just put bigger modern FPGA and you don't need Megazoom anymore.

[wraper]

I would not bet on a new ASIC.  The advantage of an ASIC over an FPGA is possibly lower power consumption at the same performance. However ASICs can not use the high end processes as FPGAs due to the very high mask costs. So the advantage is getting smaller and smaller - if there is any left at all.

Nowadays using a GPU for doing all the heavy lifting is a good choice for building a DSO. Performance, power consumption, production cost, software development cost and flexibility wise there is no match.

GPU is pretty much useless for what Megazoom ASIC does. The problem is not CPU or graphical processing power.

[nctnico]

I would not bet on a new ASIC.  The advantage of an ASIC over an FPGA is possibly lower power consumption at the same performance. However ASICs can not use the high end processes as FPGAs due to the very high mask costs. So the advantage is getting smaller and smaller - if there is any left at all.

Nowadays using a GPU for doing all the heavy lifting is a good choice for building a DSO. Performance, power consumption, production cost, software development cost and flexibility wise there is no match.

GPU is pretty much useless for what Megazoom ASIC does. The problem is not CPU or graphical processing power.

You are forgetting that a GPU is mostly a processor which can do massive parallel calculations quickly because it has lots of processors with a highly optimised memory access channel. Look at languages like Cuda and OpenCL which are used to program massive parallel processors like GPUs. What a GPU can do very efficiently is taking a bunch of acquisitions and process these into a trace in parallel for example. A CPU can't get close to this speed, an FPGA would need a massive amount of logic and development time and neither will reach the energy efficieny of a GPU. And compared to an ASIC, the development cycle is shorter and flexibility is much better for a GPU based solution. The only problem is to get the data into the GPU memory. It is possible though that Keysight has developed an ASIC containing an off-the-shelve GPU solution + ADC interface as a building block for a DSO. Whatever Keysight comes up with has to be a leap forward somehow.

[wraper]

You are forgetting that a GPU is mostly a processor which can do massive parallel calculations quickly because it has lots of processors with a highly optimised memory access channel. Look at languages like Cuda and OpenCL which are used to program massive parallel processors like GPUs. What a GPU can do very efficiently is taking a bunch of acquisitions and process these into a trace in parallel for example. A CPU can't get close to this speed, an FPGA would need a massive amount of logic and development time and neither will reach the energy efficieny of a GPU. And compared to an ASIC, the development cycle is shorter and flexibility is much better for a GPU based solution. The only problem is to get the data into the GPU memory. It is possible though that Keysight has developed an ASIC containing an off-the-shelve GPU solution + ADC interface as a building block for a DSO. Whatever Keysight comes up with has to be a leap forward somehow.

Bingo!

[2N3055]

You are forgetting that a GPU is mostly a processor which can do massive parallel calculations quickly because it has lots of processors with a highly optimised memory access channel. Look at languages like Cuda and OpenCL which are used to program massive parallel processors like GPUs. What a GPU can do very efficiently is taking a bunch of acquisitions and process these into a trace in parallel for example. A CPU can't get close to this speed, an FPGA would need a massive amount of logic and development time and neither will reach the energy efficieny of a GPU. And compared to an ASIC, the development cycle is shorter and flexibility is much better for a GPU based solution. The only problem is to get the data into the GPU memory. It is possible though that Keysight has developed an ASIC containing an off-the-shelve GPU solution + ADC interface as a building block for a DSO. Whatever Keysight comes up with has to be a leap forward somehow.

Bingo!

Exactly!

[nctnico]

You are forgetting that a GPU is mostly a processor which can do massive parallel calculations quickly because it has lots of processors with a highly optimised memory access channel. Look at languages like Cuda and OpenCL which are used to program massive parallel processors like GPUs. What a GPU can do very efficiently is taking a bunch of acquisitions and process these into a trace in parallel for example. A CPU can't get close to this speed, an FPGA would need a massive amount of logic and development time and neither will reach the energy efficieny of a GPU. And compared to an ASIC, the development cycle is shorter and flexibility is much better for a GPU based solution. The only problem is to get the data into the GPU memory. It is possible though that Keysight has developed an ASIC containing an off-the-shelve GPU solution + ADC interface as a building block for a DSO. Whatever Keysight comes up with has to be a leap forward somehow.

Bingo!

But as I implied: it doesn't make sense to have an FPGA just to interface between a SoC and the ADCs. Most SoCs don't even have a way of accessing the memory with a high enough bandwidth and off-the-shelve FPGAs with GPU + SoC don't offer very high performance per dollar. If your aim is to build a high performance DSO and you have the money to spin an ASIC, it makes a lot of sense to create an ASIC which has the ADC interface, trigger engine, memory interface, processor and GPU on one chip. All of these are off-the-shelve IP blocks you can buy (or Keysight already has) and turn into a chip with relatively low NRE costs. Say somewhere around US$10M to US$50M. You can built an entire line of DSOs based on such a chip where the differentiators are the ADC, analog frontend and supported software options.

[mikeselectricstuff]

I would not bet on a new ASIC.  The advantage of an ASIC over an FPGA is possibly lower power consumption at the same performance.

And lower cost, though only after the NRE is revovered.