Good writeup by Jan Gray.<p>If we look at it from today, some things have changed, but the end result holds true - at least for general purpose computing.<p>The FPGA vendors (esp Xilinx and Altera) have released devices where the intergration between a hard CPU core and the FPGA is much tighter than using a standardised bus like PCI. This gives a much lower latency. In these devices the CPUs are normally ARM based.<p>The prevalence of GPUs as PCIe connected coporocessors and OpenCL has also made FPGA based computing connected via PCIe much easier.<p>One thing that has not improved, but rather worsened is the difference in clock frequency between CPU and FPGA. In Grays posting he talket about PPro running at 200 MHz. Today we have cores running at 2-3 GHz while FPGAs are hard to push beyond 200 MHz.<p>For applications that are highly parallel, takes a lot of cycles and not suitable for GPU processing, FPGAs might be useful as base for custom coprocessors even for x86, Power, SPARC based servers. But otherwise probably not.<p>For embedded systems FPGAs makes more sense, but cost of the device and power consumption might make it less so. The integrated SoC devices from Xilinx and Altera can do cool things like media processing, SDR competitively.<p>The Novena is an example of a modern system where the CPU has access to a FPGA over a low latency interface which makes it useful as a coprocessor. But the Novena is really not built to be cost efficient.