I think you touched on one of the biggest things about FPGAs in your comment, which is that they are perfect for computation that does not involve branches. If

I think you touched on one of the biggest things about FPGAs in your comment, which is that they are perfect for computation that does not involve branches. If you've got a lot of data, and you're doing transforms, you usually don't need to branch, so being able to crunch everything through in parallel is a massive benefit. Also agree that additional hard logic or peripherals will be a game-changer for FPGAs, though they would make each design more domain-specific. Alternatively, we may see a shift in how the interconnects are done, which allows for flexible use of these 'modules'. It's also possible that we'll see continual increases in LE counts which make more specialized hardware unnecessary. I don't know which way things will go.