Comment Re:Life Cycle (Score 1) 118
The drawback with using FPGAs compared to commodity processors is that the FPGA market currently does not support using the bleeding edge processes that CPUs are manufactured with. Typically a competitively priced FPGA will be at least one generation behind a CPU. In HPC FPGA's are a plausible improvement, but at a smaller scale the development costs for incorporating a custom firmware for an FPGA into an application are significant. It all really rests on what demand is out there for a particular algorithm to be implemented as a firmware for an FPGA. FPGAs have limited floating point resources, for example the largest Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA has about 2000 25 x 18 floating point units.