I have an idea for a hardware accelerated VP8 video encoder. The bottleneck is pretty obvious. Any FPGA that supports PCIe costs enough that you can just buy a

I have an idea for a hardware accelerated VP8 video encoder. The bottleneck is pretty obvious. Any FPGA that supports PCIe costs enough that you can just buy a faster CPU and do everything in software. 1080p@60fps requires around 3gbps. Your only hope is to take a low end FPGA and connect it to the USB 3.0 FTDI chip that gives you a 32 bit @ 100MHz parallel interface. The resulting PCB including all hardware would probably cost around 60€. This would be enough to reduce the costs of real time video encoding below 100ms to make it profitable to run it as a business with a slim profit margin. It's pretty obvious that an FPGA is a bad choice as an accelerator if you can get away with it. Future CXL FPGAs will be highly capable platforms, but they will be both expensive and a nightmare to develop for, negating most of the reasons why you would use them. By the way, your complaints about LUTs taking up transistors is pretty irrelevant. Most of the transistors are being "wasted" on the routing switches and connection boxes. The space taken up by LUTs is so small that there are mask programmable gate arrays, aka FPGAs without the routing switches and connection boxes. They end up three times as dense as a regular FPGA as a result.