Can confirm this eerie ability of FPGA and h/w folks from another domain (regular expressions - I'm the designer of Hyperscan, a s/w solution). Every corner ca

Can confirm this eerie ability of FPGA and h/w folks from another domain (regular expressions - I'm the designer of Hyperscan, a s/w solution). Every corner case that could be found in s/w was always the topic of a excited benchmark. Also, the old trick of 'hey, let's drop all the matches on the floor in our h/w or FPGA, while getting a huge number of matches in s/w and making the s/w guys look ridiculous'. Every time I read a paper touting a great new speedup on FPGA (over some crap s/w implementation) I'm reminded of that old joke about the Texan visiting Israel and telling the owner of some small farm that "he can get on a tractor and ride for days without getting the the boundary of his property." The Israeli nods sympathetically and says "Yes, I too used to have a tractor like that".