You're conflating open source IP cores such as LiteX with open source FPGA tooling to try to make the latter look better by using the former. Everyone knows that vendor IP is pretty terrible if you don't use it in the very narrow window in which it's validated and tested. That's why big defense contractors all use either the Northwest Logic or Rambus PCI-e cores on everything prior to Versal.
But at the same time, those cores are big and powerful, and optimize horribly because the customers who actually use them need all of those features. Those customers aren't really concerned with area but rather with meeting performance requirements. Using the Xilinx provided QDMA core, I've been able to achieve line rate performance on PCI-e 4.0 x16 for large DMA transactions with a setup time of about 3 total days of work. I'd like to see an open source solution that could even do that with just ACKing raw TLPs because I haven't found one yet.
As for pricing, AMD/Xilinx and Altera don't want you as a customer. They want to sign $10M+/yr accounts or accounts which push the envelope of what's possible in terms of frequency (HFT). And they price their products accordingly for the public. If you actually end up as a direct customer, the prices are significantly cheaper to the point where those cheaper Chinese vendors don't make sense to use.
But at the same time, those cores are big and powerful, and optimize horribly because the customers who actually use them need all of those features. Those customers aren't really concerned with area but rather with meeting performance requirements. Using the Xilinx provided QDMA core, I've been able to achieve line rate performance on PCI-e 4.0 x16 for large DMA transactions with a setup time of about 3 total days of work. I'd like to see an open source solution that could even do that with just ACKing raw TLPs because I haven't found one yet.
As for pricing, AMD/Xilinx and Altera don't want you as a customer. They want to sign $10M+/yr accounts or accounts which push the envelope of what's possible in terms of frequency (HFT). And they price their products accordingly for the public. If you actually end up as a direct customer, the prices are significantly cheaper to the point where those cheaper Chinese vendors don't make sense to use.