Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Xilinx FPGAs

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect to Xilinx#Family lines of products. Most of the "keep" !votes are variations of WP:USEFUL and fail to address how WP:NLIST is met. King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 06:25, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

List of Xilinx FPGAs

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List of Xilinx FPGAs (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Boldly redirected by @Drmies:, subsequently contested twice. No opinion myself on the merits, but sending it here to prevent edit warring. Taking Out The Trash (talk) 18:17, 7 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]


Comment from a hardware engineer who restored the article:

This article is sourced with information from Xilinx, the world's (former) largest FPGA manufacturer prior to being bought by AMD. Condensed information on the history of Xilinx FPGAs is difficult to find, and this article is extremely useful for electrical and hardware engineers. I am posting this from my job, as I had to take time out of my day to track down where this article went, when all I needed was to compare gate sizes of old obsolete Xilinx FPGAs. If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ford_vehicles and similar get to exist, this should as well. You might think FPGAs are "non-notable" products, but you would be very, very incorrect. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2603:300B:14D9:8000:692B:E4AF:AABC:37FA (talk) 18:37, 7 December 2022 (UTC) — 2603:300B:14D9:8000:692B:E4AF:AABC:37FA (talk) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]

Comment See WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Jalen Folf (talk) 19:36, 7 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Well, yes: a generalist encyclopedia provides half-hearted coverage and isn't particularly useful in most cases, which is why most of them are dead. Why should we aspire to be more like one? Britannica discontinued its print edition and Encarta was shut down entirely, due largely to Wikipedia's depth and breath of coverage being superior in every way. jp×g 03:26, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'd argue that Wikipedia also has many pages about mathematical equations that most people never have heard of. As well as many computer algorithms nobody would need to know outside of CS people. You can find them in other math handbooks and textbooks, but it doesn't stop them from being introduced on a more brief level towards general public. The situation is similar here, the list contains the basic introduction about the characteristics of some FPGA manufactured by a specific vendor without much detail. And you can tell as the time goes by how large or powerful the state-of-the-art FPGAs have become. Things like how the DSP functions internally with how many pipeline registers and what kind of data operation induce how many clock cycle latency, they can be kept out of this page and let people find them in thousands of pages of datasheets.
I think this situation is mostly caused by the costly development of some specific engineering fields. Mostly in integrated circuit and transportation vehicle manufacturing. You can hardly find a diverse group of people working on the same problem, unlike say developing a sorting algorithm for finding largest number in a database. Usually it's just one problem, and one or two solutions. Sometimes the solution is this kind of lists, like Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. LucienneGainsborough (talk) 13:06, 12 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep and clean up The information here is valuable, but the formatting needs work in some sections. I disagree with the other person saying it needs to be trimmed down; I would say it needs to be *organized*, but most of the current contents should be kept. 97.115.253.45 (talk) 21:59, 7 December 2022 (UTC) — 97.115.253.45 (talk) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. [reply]
    • As an addendum to what I said above, I'd also like to note that, while FPGAs are somewhat less well-known outside of engineering circles, that they are of similar notability to CPUs, and (yes, WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, but) wikipedia does have List of Intel processors and List of AMD processors, neither of which seem to have spawned any debate over their inclusion in wikipedia. 97.115.253.45 (talk) 16:07, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Also, yes, it looks like I've made no other edits. My dynamic IP seems to have changed recently; I have made other edits in the past. 97.115.253.45 (talk) 16:10, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • IP, I did not place that note there, and I think it is unhelpful and undeserved--I prefer to look at arguments. What I don't see is an argument for keeping besides "it's valuable", and that's not an argument but a statement. Lots of things that might be valuable are not encyclopedic. Organization? I don't know. It's basic, for me: it needs secondary sourcing, and no one in this discussion has offered ANY yet. Also, OTHERSTUFF--I can't go and patrol all the six or seven million articles on Wikipedia, but yes, I think all (or many) of those articles are utterly redundant and make a mockery of what the project should be. Drmies (talk) 16:54, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep FPGAs are a significant product category in modern digital electronics and Xilinx are a historically important supplier of FPGAs. This list article is more useful in electrical engineering than a List_of_Pokémon, now over a thousand strong, which seems to find space on Wikipedia. GrahamN-UK (talk) 23:50, 7 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • GrahamN-UK, please go ahead and nominate that article as well; you have my blessing. As far as I'm concerned, all that stuff needs to go. Drmies (talk) 01:37, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      I have no wish to delete the Pokemon list; it's not my cup of tea but I assume it's useful to the people who have collated the information. We have a number of EEs here who have stated this collated list of Xilinx FPGA information is useful and we should retain it on that basis. The only voice currently in favour of deleting the page is yours. From your talk page you don't seem to have any relevant interest in FPGAs but you do have an interest in deleting pages. GrahamN-UK (talk) 02:28, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. First of all, the boilerplate: FPGAs are notable, Xilinx is notable, it's not obvious that each individual entry on this list is notable but surely the group is notable. The question, then, is whether the list is notable. I am an engineer and I cannot envision a solid argument for deleting it. Drmies has redirected it saying that it's "product information": okay, that makes it sound bad. But this isn't a list of anime figurines or pop singles or Funko Pops or whatever, it's a list of circuit components that are a crucial part of design for a large number of systems, devices, et cetera. I'm not going to be one of those dramatists who says "people will die if this article is deleted", but it's probably worth mentioning that FPGAs (including FPGAs from Xilinx) are in controllers for all sorts of things like traffic lights, ignition switches, industrial machinery and safety equipment. jp×g 01:19, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • User:JPxG, you're saying that the list article is relevant because you say the circuit components are important, more important than Funko Pops (I don't know what those are--but I also don't know what FPGAs are). That these things are found in many other things is relevant, but if we're talking about a ton of things that are not notable by themselves, things for which there is not a SHRED of secondary sourcing, and for which there is nothing that indicates that any of the elements are of encyclopedic value--then I'm a no. I mean, sure these things may be important in a traffic light, but traffic lights also have light bulbs, and lists of those light bulbs are also unencyclopedic. Drmies (talk) 01:37, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • "I also don't know what FPGAs are" As you don't know what they are how can you have any basis to decide whether a page about them is relevant? A better way to determine the relevance of the page is to listen to those who understand them, and use them, all of whom are in favour of retaining the page. GrahamN-UK (talk) 02:35, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        • GrahamN-UK, notability comes from sourcing; see WP:N. At the risk of mansplaining, we're not talking about chips or switches or whatever--we're talking about the notability of an article on them. If they're important, secondary sources should say so. That's what makes notability. Drmies (talk) 15:53, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I had typed something out about this as a follow-up comment, but I closed the tab: guess that'll show me. Anyway... I don't think either of us is going to come up with a satisfactory definition of "encyclopedic value" here. Generally speaking, field-programmable gate arrays are integrated circuits that function in a similar role as ASICs or CPUs; they're the brains of an embedded system (or whatever chipset they're used in). The specifications of the FPGA generally determine the specifications for the rest of the system, so I would say a list of them is significant in a way that a list of diodes would not be. As for independent sources, well, we are doing a little better than "not a SHRED": I see EEJournal, SEC filings, XCell Journal, UC Berkeley and the EE Times. Surely this is something. However, I suppose the broader point is that most of the references are to data sheets -- but what else would they be to? Data sheets are canonical descriptions of how integrated circuits work; they're technical documents prepared for the sole purpose of describing the characteristics and behavior of a component. Any electronics engineer is very well-acquainted with the use of datasheets for objective facts about components, regardless of their opinions about the company itself; if they weren't, it would be impossible for us to be having this conversation. I'm typing on a USB keyboard, whose device controller communicates with my computer's USB host controller, which sends data along a bus which is processed by the kernel via my computer's CPU (and some thousands of other components between my computer and yours, of which I will spare you the details). Some of these components were made by communists and some of them were made by capitalists -- among the capitalists (and conceivably among the communists as well) many were made by firms that hated each others' guts, but all of them are able to agree on datasheets that describe how the components interfaced with each other, which is how I'm posting this comment. If the companies lied on their datasheets, the computer wouldn't work: the pins would be at the wrong voltage, or they wouldn't fit on the board, or they wouldn't be able to transmit because they were receiving signals incorrectly. What I mean to say by this is that, so long as we've established that the preconditions for this list are notable (Xilinx is notable, FPGAs are notable, FPGA applications are notable, embedded systems are notable), there's no real reason to doubt the reliability of integrated circuit datasheets outside of some strange hypothetical in which a company is lying on them, which would itself be a news item with ample documentation. jp×g 03:20, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete for reasons given above. This is JUST product information. If all of this is so incredibly important that we need a list without secondary sourcing of 122k and hundreds of products, one would expect the article for the manufacturer, Xilinx, to be a bit more than a COI-inflected bit of company news. Drmies (talk) 01:37, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I'm not soldering Xilinx on my board, I'm soldering their chips. The article Computational physics is much longer than the article Journal of Computational Physics, for the same reason. jp×g 03:15, 8 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: There needs to be less technical talk and more focus on notability and sources. And it would be nice if some of those advocating "clean up" also volunteered to do this work, especially if you are knowledgeable about the subject.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Liz Read! Talk! 07:02, 15 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I don't think it is going to do any good to retype all of the stuff I said above, but I've addressed all of the things you are saying here. First of all, it is not a "product page listing". many of these chips are no longer manufactured or sold by Xilinx. This article does not serve any marketing purpose for them: their own website has a bunch of datasheets squirreled away in obscure locations. The main part of it is just going to tell you a bunch of stuff about how you should buy the latest models: their FPGA homepage just talks about 16nm, 20nm, 28nm and 45nm. Meanwhile, our list includes 2000nm models as far back as 1985.
It would indeed theoretically be possible for readers to go read a bunch of stuff on the Internet to learn more about a subject: we don't need a list of Xilinx FPGAs, and we don't need an article about Antarctica, and we don't need an article about the Peloponnesian War -- but we have them because we are an encyclopedia. What kind of "historical analysis" are you looking for in a list article? I would be glad to write this for you, if you could explain what it means. jp×g 15:51, 26 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]


Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 23:14, 25 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete it appears most of this is from primary sources with the company and can't be used; I don't find anything for sources and this is likely too technical to be included in a general encyclopedia. The list of Ford vehicles mentioned at least has some discussion around them, this is a wall of text with no images or much of an explanation for anything given. Oaktree b (talk) 01:17, 26 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Oaktree b: I would be glad to find illustrations or write explanations of technical content (in addition to the "historical analysis" mentioned above), if you have an idea of what that would entail for this list article. jp×g 15:51, 26 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know enough about the subject to comment, it would have to be "dumbed-down" (at least partially), so it can make sense to the average reader, otherwise I have no idea what it's talking about. Oaktree b (talk) 16:18, 29 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I am an engineer, and I find this article a lot more usable than Xilinx's own website to understand the differences between different FPGAs, including older models. This wikipedia article ignores all the marketing nonsense and simply tells me the facts of what each of the FPGAs can do. Now, I know some of the main issues here are (1) lack of primary sources [though there are several primary sources cited], and (2) there is a some extraneous information [we can clean that up, and we should also give more of a preamble of what all this stuff means]. I think List of Nvidia graphics processing units is a good example of how this article ought to become. That NVIDIA article has also helped me a lot with my engineering work. Biod534760 (talk) 05:38, 31 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep This is not just an indiscriminate list; it has lots of useful commentary on the various classifications of FPGAs. It is also well sourced. I would certainly use the article if I was going to use these parts in a design. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BruceThomson (talk • contribs) 07:29, 1 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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