[lloydjatkinson]

> In the embedded world they're available and not even super new,

I feel you might be understating this! FPGA's and ASIC's have in fact been in use for decades now, they are very much ingrained into many high end products. Any digital oscilloscope has an FPGA, and has done for a very long time, for example. These are often either used in combination with a CPU for the UI part. The CPU might either be an IC on the PCB or what is quite popular is having the CPU be a synthesised one programmed into the FPGA.

ARM, for example, have a whole architecture specifically designed for optimal FPGA synthesis.

There are a number of relatively cheap SBC's out there with an FPGA too. http://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-sbc-runs-linux-on-xilinx-zynq-ar...