&gt;  Modern desktop CPUs are incredibly fast and run circles around modern FPGAs<p>Yep. At a tiny price of tenths of W of TDP.<p>FPGAs shine in communication, not in computing. Fast isolated memories, wide channels (as wide as you like), etc. And there are far more tasks where you have to juggle gigabytes of data as fast as possible than the tasks where you have to maximise FLOPS.