The soft machines [FPGA]

The decision by PC processor makers to forge connections to FPGA accelerators has opened up a market for embedded-compute engines styled as appliance, and programmable logic may end up being a core part of the PC itself. It's rarely a good idea to bet against programmability. The trend has always been towards more flexible, reusable, programmable systems. That means that, over time, processors generally win out. But problems with power consumption, particularly on multi-gigahertz, PC-class processors, means that there is no longer an easy option for performance improvements in software. It has to be split up and run on parallel elements.