I'm going to start with this. A CPU can offer you way more in a practical sense, because of the ease with which you can handle so many things, and that fact tha

I'm going to start with this. A CPU can offer you way more in a practical sense, because of the ease with which you can handle so many things, and that fact that there is so much more development and expertise that you can tap. FPGAs aren't super hard, but I don't think it's a leap to say they're still pretty arcane. One thing I would say, is real time by design? That always seems to be one complaint of people when you are talking about dedicated hardware vs running things on a computer. People can argue until the sun goes down about what constitutes 'real time' in a cpu, as to how your RTOS works, how you are guaranteeing latency and response time. You're rarely if ever going to have that issue in FPGAs, you get control down to the clock cycle level. The downside is that it's like assembly, you have to specify it down to that level. If your task consists of a bunch of independent workloads, FPGAs are great at that. I would say, given the same end result, the FPGA can probably do it better, more efficiently, probably beat it in most important metrics. But the development getting to that point? If the CPU can physically do it, it's going to be a fraction of the development time, near guaranteed. Add on top of that, data handling, content, usability, things that are an afterthought on a computer are very non-trivial on an FPGA.