Yeah I don't really see FPGAs ever making their way down to consumers the way GPUs and CPUs have (end users actually programming them). For (semi) fixed pipeli

Yeah I don't really see FPGAs ever making their way down to consumers the way GPUs and CPUs have (end users actually programming them). For (semi) fixed pipeline operations FPGAs will basically always be worse than some slightly more specialized ASIC like a GPU/AI engine. One area FPGAs can be exceptionally good at is real-time operations. You have much better control over timing in the general on FPGAs vs MCU/CPUs, but I don't think that's inherent (you could probably alter the mcu architecture a bit and close the gap). I could be wrong but I also think you get better power draw for things like mid to low volume glue chips in embedded systems because you're not powering big SRAM banks and DMAs just to pipe data between a couple hardware interfaces. This is only because of market forces though obviously, because if mid to low volume ASICs become viable in terms of dev time they'll be much better.