Xilinx Vitis and Vitis AI Software Development Platforms

At this week's Xilinx Developers Forum (XDF) in San Jose, California, Xilinx announced "Vitis" – a new framework for developing applications that use Xilinx programmable logic devices such as FPGAs, ACAPs, MPSoCs, RFSoCs, and all the other acronyms they can come up with that refer to what we'd call "FPGAs." With an abundance of grandiosity, the company proclaimed that Vitis was "five years and a total of 1,000 man-years in the making." We don't frequently encounter person-millenia metrics for new product announcements. Even if we assume that they started this in 1984 when Xilinx was founded, they would still have needed at least 28 engineers writing code full time for Vitis over that 35 year span. Spoiler: engineering-eons aside, Vitis IS impressive, and more importantly, is likely to mature to be even more impressive over the coming years.