FPGA&#x27;s are never as efficient as dedicated silicon they are flexible but that flexibility comes at a huge cost both in performance and materials.
FPGA&#x27;s are used in situations where it&#x27;s not commercially viable to spin your own chips and where you can offset the high cost of FPGA&#x27;s to your consumer.<p>If anything the &quot;future&quot; might be in on-demand core configs similar to how modern ARM SOC&#x27;s are being built from a combination of &quot;small&quot; and &quot;big&quot; cores with different features and performance head space that allows for more efficient power usage for small devices.<p>So core-specific optimizations for different applications (Database, Web Server, Video Streaming etc.) might be quite possible especially when combined with user-programmable micro-code might be much better than FPGA&#x27;s.
Basically you might have a dedicated CPU (that you might even be able to partial design yourself by submitting VLSI code or something similar) which is specifically tuned for your application e.g. a web application server CPU with 4 big cores that handle executing the application code it self, with additional smaller cores that handle things like HTTP, SSL, session cache etc. each with dedicated register&#x2F;extensions optimized for those actions e.g. LZMA or AES extensions.