Possible fears about compromising the host system are of course justified. But such fears are appropriate for all DMA-capable devices, for example. FPGAs are g

Possible fears about compromising the host system are of course justified. But such fears are appropriate for all DMA-capable devices, for example. FPGAs are general purpose in a broader sense than CPUs or (GP)GPUs. And, no other general purpose computing device is able to transport and compute incoming data in a pipeline in a few cycles (10, 100, whatever) from input to output. 30Gbyte per second? No problem. Under certain circumstances even guaranteed on a normal PC. A general interface such as a BIOS mapped into the memory would be interesting for many applications. Apple has taken a good step with the Afterburner (like others before it in the music and movie sector). After the coin hype, FPGAs once again disappeared into the niche of high-frequency trading, only to become popular in the low-price spectrum of chips for console emulators in recent years. No cloud provider has managed to bring FPGAs to the masses. Intel and AMD have bought the market leaders and have blown all efforts to achieve something in the data centers. AMD seems to take the first step: introduction of a general interface. The directly necessary next step would be something like CUDA (apart from IP, the name once stood for "Compute Unified Device Architecture") instead of VHDL or Verilog. It doesn't even have to be open source. It has to be something where you can compile a demo program (Mandelbrot and RISC V and 68030) in five minutes and get it running (and don't always tell everyone that it's called "synthesizing"). On a PC with a typical graphics card, place & route would be much faster. But not with a tcl/tk interface in Java as with Vivado.