Insofar as an FPGA can have a customized pipeline to deal with an operation without the overhead of your CPU's instruction pipeline? Yes. Most any task can be s

Insofar as an FPGA can have a customized pipeline to deal with an operation without the overhead of your CPU's instruction pipeline? Yes. Most any task can be sped up, but ultimately whether or not an FPGA is right will depend on how much that FPGA costs out the door vs a CPU, and how much you optimized the algorithm for your chosen task. With proper engineering an FPGA can handily beat a CPU in many cases... but it's going to depend on the task, the FPGA in question, and what CPU it's going up against. As with all things, it depends on the particular task and how much you have to spend.