FPGA's also have billions of transistors now, but adding more block memory means removing transistors from something else, such as LUT's, registers, DSP blocks etc.
As always it is a tradeoff, and given many designs don't need much block memory, or need so much memory that external memory is a better choice anyway.
Recently at work I developed a small suite tools (in a mixture of python and shell, running in WSL) that left my boss impressed when he saw me debugging a customers system (IOT).
Then he started asking me to make them accessible to non programmers, and suddenly those tools seemed a lot more than I bargained for.
Different volcano, but back in the 50's the natural tephra damn on the crater lake of Mount Ruapehu (New Zealand) collapsed triggering a lahar, that ultimately took out the piers of rail bridge near Tangiwai minutes before a passenger train tragically attempted to cross the bridge, resulting in mass casualty's.
So certainly possible for non-expulsive activities to trigger a lahar and for consequences that sound like they are more from a disaster movie then real life to occur.
That is correct, if the first few records (a virtual block size sorta) (not sure how many off the top of my head) don't compress well, it assumes that the file is not compressible and just writes the data out skipping the compression step.
That quote doesn't contradict what mkl said, towards the end of the article it does say this thou, "The cloak will be on display in the new museum developed in Perth, set to open in Spring 2024."
As always it is a tradeoff, and given many designs don't need much block memory, or need so much memory that external memory is a better choice anyway.
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