If 2 keeps not happenning — if producing custom ASICs remains expensive — it becomes increasingly attractive to produce cheap as-good-as-they-get FPGAs in massi

If 2 keeps not happenning — if producing custom ASICs remains expensive — it becomes increasingly attractive to produce cheap as-good-as-they-get FPGAs in massive quantities. Ironically, FPGAs as endgame would be way more disruptive than an "ASICs to the people" endgame. FPGA density, price/gate and power efficiency trail "native" hardware but constant factors of overhead but it should be possible to reduce the gap compared to now. More FPGA volume means better economies; the hardware architecture could be optimized further; most importantly IMHO the current design tools are heinously unfriendly and could benefit a lot from programmer attention (once programmers realize a more-or-finalized FPGA structure is the "new assembly" to optimize for). I'm not sure if a constant factor of disadvantage would become very acceptable (because we'll drop the throw-faster-hardware-at-it mentality) or very unacceptable (because robots with FPGA brains always lose at high-frequency chess wrestling to robots with native brains).