It still looks an expensive FPGA development kit to me. A Parallella board is a cheap FPGA development kit. One think I can't tell is whether the FPGA on the N

It still looks an expensive FPGA development kit to me. A Parallella board is a cheap FPGA development kit. One think I can't tell is whether the FPGA on the Novena can bus-master back to the main CPU. I'm sure somebody could spin a Mini PCI/PCI Express Mini Card with an FPGA easily enough that would let you do interesting stuff in a laptop.