That's really cool. It looks like the ARM is doing the heavy lifting, though, and is supplemented by custom hardware (likely Xilinx's many hardware IPs) that th

That's really cool. It looks like the ARM is doing the heavy lifting, though, and is supplemented by custom hardware (likely Xilinx's many hardware IPs) that the ARM farms things out to. I'm not saying this sort of thing has no place, and I think it's awesome, but you need the ASIC processor for this to be fast. This is perfect for Zynq because of the built-in ARM. You are right that it is also possible with just an FPGA, but FPGA logic is an order of magnitude slower than ASIC. People still do this sort of thing with soft processors though. Probably a lot. The limits of this is you're not making custom IP, but rather using a library of digital logic designs provided by Xilinx. Which works well for a lot of use cases, but it's not on the same abstraction level as actually describing the hardware itself.