Exactly. There is an algorithm for detecting bursts of unusual activity which is extremely well suited for FPGAs: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/shasha/paper

Exactly. There is an algorithm for detecting bursts of unusual activity which is extremely well suited for FPGAs: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/shasha/papers/burst.d/burst.pdf http://www.cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/shasha/papers/burst.d/burst... Basically it is a tree of registers with checks. It can compute burst position and duration in the O(log(window size)) time (clocks). You look here at 2.5..5ns (200MHz..400MHz) multiplied by log2(window size) - 25..50 ns for window with 1024 samples. You just cannot get that kind of connectivity with CPU/GPU. Processing these samples in CPU will get you into several hundreds of ns, if not more.