That&#x27;s not really true FPGA CPU&#x27;s tend to be very slow relatively to the speed of the FPGA and comparable ASIC&#x27;s.<p>Yes you can program the FPGA to do say LZMA very quickly but you can just as well build a dedicated SIMD ASIC that will do the same and at much lower cost.<p>If you design your CPU to include current ISA big cores combined with small mission specific SIMD ASIC&#x27;s it will be better than building a CPU with additional FPGA cores or building a CPU on an FPGA which is an insanity to begin with.<p>I would yield that FPGA are more flexible but if you can build more or less flexible SIMD ASIC&#x27;s that are user configurable you will get a similar flexibility to FPGA&#x27;s with better performance still, eventually there&#x27;s a limit to how many non-generic operations the CPU handles and there will be a fairly low limit on how many of those will deserve dedicated silicon before you over-optimize and lose performance.