If you algorithm is standard just google "FPGA/ASIC IP provider" (of which there are many, eg H264 etc) and pay the price, your results will be optimal and cheaper than doing it yourself - assuming you never have before.

If your alogirthm is custom then you are either going to make a horrible job of it as you learn HW as you go, it takes years to get optimal and reach the clock speeds, area, and QoR/Test coverage numbers needed for production Si. Alternatively you could hire a HW team who will cost you a pretty penny to get it done, or outsource - also not cheap but it allows for risk reduction.

How many gates isnt just a question of counting "*" and "/" and scaling (although back of napkin will give you a general feel). Practically any C/C++ you write is going to be very sequentially orientated, this results in algorithms that probably have better parallel implementations. Whilst you might now be thinking threads, or separate processes we are talking HW parallelism, which is far more fine grained than threads, than SW parallelism. Further any integers you have may be optimizable to less than 32 (eg 1 bit or 3 bits) thus saving a large amount of HW area. Finally you didnt really say what sort of performance you want - if its 1MHz and 1 word / year of I/O then I suspect you could build some very clever hardware to do it all a few gates but if its 1GHz and 1 Giga Words/sec then area might expand as you will need to duplicate the circuit in parallel. Finally the speed at which you process data will affect latency (time from input to the first correct output) which is often a killer in real-time or other systems (eg. If you put LCD TVs side by side you might notice some are running several seconds behind whats being broadcast - this is because as it received the image some are doing more video processing to clean up the image - latency )

So at this point I would recommend looking into SystemC (based around C++), SystemVerilog (so so ) and then a raft of tools to help you do the job. These tools are called "High Level Synthesis" (HLS) tools and they arent cheap but they do cut down on man hours manually converting algorithms, but you will still need to be able to think extremely low level as bad code results in bad gate count - no matter the language.

I dont want to come over as a shill so I am going to present the 4 main competitors for HLS tools;
1) Calypto Systems, formerly Mentor Graphics' tools before spin-out ( http://calypto.com/en/products/catapult/overview )
2) Forte Desgin systems ( http://www.forteds.com/products/cynthesizer.asp )
3) Cadence C2S ( http://www.cadence.com/products/sd/silicon_compiler/pages/default.aspx )
4) Impulse C ( http://www.impulseaccelerated.com/ ) - this is very reasonably priced but has its limitations.
5) There are some open source things out there, I wouldnt recommend them as they are quite in their infancy.

Disclaimer: I used to work at one of the companies that provides synthesis tools, for >10 years converting C/C++/SystemC to HW quite often for a service fee. I can tell you we never had a design that cost under 30K and most were in the 100s to millions of USD.

Good article, and with enough comment maybe MS will reform the OS. You should compare XP to Win2K - its super fast! Win1.01 loads ... but I digress!

The main point that I wanted to seed into peoples minds was that Slashdot articles on technology are usually chided for being one sided (pro Linux, anti-that, narrow minded something) but what is never mentioned is they are also often culturally one-sided.

As I no longer live in the US, having lived all over, and for quite some time in Asia I see that technology is often developed and marketed as if it would work globally. Thats not always the case...

I pick particularly on your comment about TV on the PC. In Japan, for example, most average young things have an apartment only slightly bigger than the bed. So PC + TV is quite a space saving attraction here, although I don't think that's why its in Vista.

The other oddity you could add to your Windows woes, although not specifically Vista related, is that often Asian Windows maintain the ALT+Alpha key strokes from English versions despite having no connection to the action it performs. (Alt+A is save-All normally, but in Chinese there is no A in "save all"). So big bouncy GUIs help those that don't have a memory as large as the national library of congress to store all those key strokes.

There are other subtle things when comparing a product in another country - but these two strike a powerful example of how designers and critics alike should consider a product in its surroundings.