Exactly. These are far far away from cheap FPGAs, Spartan 6 chips are just old, but not cheap. When thinking about cheap FPGAs I imagine these cheap things from Lattice for interface bridging.
Cheap ARM SoCs were on ARM’s roadmap back then. Cortex A9 was huge innovation these days.
I guess they were thinking they'd be using very expensive FPGAs in the the first VC-funded iterations, and then move on to something cheaper. But they never got there...
"... the company had doubled or tripled its revenue every year since 2008, when it had about $1 million in sales.
...
The company was backed by about $38 million in funding from investors including Goldman Sachs, ComVentures, Foundation Capital, Fuse Capital, and Mayfield Fund."
Fpgas are often used as a stepping stone towards cheaper asic or hybrid solutions. asic requires a high volume and a working design, neither of which you have early in the project.
Reminds me of another 'we will make it up in volume' dotcom scam I-Opener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener selling ~$500 worth of computer and LCD monitor at $99
Reminds me of the nVidia GSync module. Those used FPGAs which costed about 250 $/1ku iirc and 768 MB (1st gen) / 3 GB (2nd gen) of memory. Even at the hefty pricing of GSync screens it probably only covered BOM cost.
(The large amount of memory is not because they need so much memory, but because they needed the bandwidth of a 3x 32 bit bus)
"Lot of 25 Pano Logic Thin / Zero Desktop Client Black w/ Power Supply
Buy now: US $170.00"
I wonder what the thinking was that lead Pano Logic to put expensive FPGAs inside these units, instead of some more typical cheap ARM SoC?
Edit: Ah, they operated in 2006-2012. I guess that was just before the rise of the very cheap/fast SoCs.