Faster, potentially cheaper, and more expensive to produce?<p>The history of the bitcoin miner has details and us a real-world example of software on x86 ASIC -&gt; FPGA -&gt; Custom ASIC process. It&#x27;s easy to find the relative performance of  the bitcoin miner running on everything from Rasberry PI&#x27;s to CUDA clusters [1].<p>Note that the article is using the very flexible DE2-115 and there&#x27;s lots of interesting trade-offs made to fit a bitcoin miner in only 115,000 gates... iirc, if you have 250k gates, it can run 4x (???) faster due to optimizations during synthesis.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;progranism&#x2F;Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;progranism&#x2F;Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner</a><p>Current Performance: 109 MHash&#x2F;s On a Terasic DE2-115 Development Board [2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;progranism&#x2F;Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;progranism&#x2F;Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.bitcoin.it&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Non-specialized_hardware_comparison" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.bitcoin.it&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Non-specialized_hardware_comparis...</a>