I think you misunderstood. I said very little about the relative performance. I know quite well that the FPGA can be faster. The point is you have to work 10-5

I think you misunderstood. I said very little about the relative performance. I know quite well that the FPGA can be faster. The point is you have to work 10-50x as hard to get there, if you want to do anything interesting. Arbitrary FPGA application code is not a thing. Practically speaking, by the time in your development cycle that you’ve built your custom hardware and software, got it through emissions and are ready to sell it commercially, there’s a new intel chip that is competitive with what you’re doing, using C code. (It’s an FPGA so you have to deliver custom hardware with it). FPGAs have advanced as well in this time, but you’re not using that, you’re using a 2-4 year old one. We were picking apart tcp packets and processing the data inside of them. What we built worked, and it was faster than a CPU, but we had a lot of clever non-standard custom compilers to do it. It was really fun, challenging and interesting work, but really hard to justify in a practical sense. Things like signal processing are a good application mostly because they’re well understood and the code follows the same basic pattern. Novel applications are much more difficult.