The point of FPGA is not to make competitive CPUs. It’s to _prototype_ them. Give wide access to that, and more people will be able to design cores, and experim

The point of FPGA is not to make competitive CPUs. It’s to _prototype_ them. Give wide access to that, and more people will be able to design cores, and experiment with different design trade-offs, or even computing models. Granted, a softcore on FPGA is at high volumes much more expensive and much less capable than a corresponding ASIC. At low volumes however it’s the only affordable alternative, and that’s make them the gateway to hardware design by the people (and increasingly, for the people as well). By the way I recently purchased a Tillitis key¹, a security dongle with a RISC-V soft core (PicoRV32) running on the iCE40 Ultra Plus FPGA. I absolutely love their approach, where you can run arbitrary programs on that key, and each program gets an independent secret seed (derived from the key’s secret and a hash of the program). Sure this FPGA soft core is much less powerful than an equivalently priced hard core would have been, but I’m not sure they could have done such an open design without it. Especially the upcoming unlocked version, which will allow customers to customise the "hardware" itself. I personally can’t wait, I’d like to experiment a couple optimisations. [1]: https://tillitis.se/ https://tillitis.se/