> any function important enough to require an FPGA can more economically get absorbed into the nearest silicon. For example, consider the serial/deserial coding

> any function important enough to require an FPGA can more economically get absorbed into the nearest silicon. For example, consider the serial/deserial coding of audio/video codecs. That used to be done in FGPAs, but got moved into a standard bus (SPI) and moved into codecs and CPUs. But isn't that because, back then, CPUs simply weren't fast enough for decent video coding? And they still aren't blazing fast for that purpose - compared to GPUs (see GPU-enabled video encoders). I think the main argument against FPGAs is that it's still a chore to re-purpose them. Sure, it's not as painful as making a new chip from sand, but it's harder than applying code changes to software running in production on CPUs. If it's a relatively simple algorithm, that changes rarely, where speed is the main bottleneck, that's a very promising scenario for an FPGA.