The Six Five team discusses the Lattice Development Conference.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Lattice Semi had their first ever developer conference.
Patrick Moorhead: It was great to talk with the entire leadership team. I would call it day zero. We met with CEO, Jim Anderson, Head of Products and CMO and Chief Strategy Officer, Esam, has been a great partner. But let me hit the big announcements up front and you can fill in all the fun stuff here. Two big announcements there. Avant, as we talked about on the show before, is really hitting the mid-range of FPGAs. For decades, Lattice has been focused on lower power and lowest performance. We’re talking about milliwatts and as you get into the new Avant series, which I think is doubling their SAM here, it allows them a better opportunity to compete with both Intel and AMD. They brought out Avant-G and this is a general purpose FPGA. You could pretty much make it anything you want. You want AI, you want flexible I/O with multiple interfaces. They have a dedicated memory interface as well.
Then they also brought out Avant-X, FPGA family. This is really focused on super high bandwidth and security. These are paper launches they’re sampling today, which means you’ll probably see them in the market and end products six months to a year. The second-biggest announcement they made was with NVIDIA and AI. When I first heard NVIDIA and AI, I was thinking, well, NVIDIA does a little bit of AI themselves.
And they do, but the biggest challenge, let’s say in industrial robotics on the assembly line is the ability to preprocess data in the sensor. Whether it’s the camera, it might be a vibration sensor. The two companies are working together, and I’m going to try to simplify this as best I can by Lattice has an FPGA close to the sensor and it does AI processing and then feeds rock, I’ll call it, CUDA language, trying to simplify this, into NVIDIA Orin, which is their reference board for in-dashboard or industrial automation and stuff like that. Those were the three big announcements that they made, Dan, but we had some very strategic conversations as well with the senior leadership team, and you can check that out on the Six Five.
Daniel Newman: I think you hit the big notes. It was good to be sitting down with the leadership team. Jim Anderson and his crew are always very gracious and they’ve been very ambitious. Look, this is a company that had more than a dozen straight quarters of beat and raise, just incredible results. Understanding their role in the kind of low end or the small FPGA space and have seen a strong opportunity as the focus on larger FPGAs has been really what AMD with Xilinx has been leaning in on, and Intel as well, to move up the market and into the mid-tier. That’s what they’ve been really spending a lot of time hammering home to the market is that they’re going to continue to go up. They’re doubling their SAM. They’re offering some very unique capabilities in areas like AI and low power that are helping to enable their partners, which are the big chip companies in many cases that we all know and we pay a lot of attention to, to create designs that are more power efficient.
There were some great demos. You can check out the Six Five videos we did on the ground to show how much lower power, how much more efficient memory they were able to deliver. Then of course they had some great AI demos too, things like face tracking, security applications, or how quickly they can get the boot up and down on the FPGA to make sure that the security on the server is as high and robust as possible. Milliseconds matter, as we heard on our video. But Pat, overall, having a developer conference is pretty baller. That’s the official analyst language, being able to get developers and that developer ecosystem to be paying attention to what you’re doing. They had thousands of people there, they had big companies on stage. This company is turning a corner. They’re in the billions now and that means a lot. They deserve a lot of respect.
It was a great conference, Pat. It’s a company to keep an eye on, even though industrial slowed a bit. They finally had their first quarter this time that didn’t guide up. The editorial here is they really are kicking butt and it’s hard to not be rooting for them. Humble team. It’s just small and scrappy and I appreciate that very much.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
