[duskwuff]

> Are there any really good papers, projects, or products that show where FPGAs provide a major commercial benefit over a GPU?

A couple applications that come to mind:

- RF, including cellular base station hardware and radar

- ASIC prototyping

- Low production run computer hardware, including some RAID controllers

[jdietrich]

High-end AV equipment like mixing consoles often use FPGAs alongside or instead of discrete DSP chips. The application demands sub-millisecond latency and deterministic performance but is too niche to justify spinning an ASIC.

IMO, those are the main factors that justify FPGA selection - low latency and hard real-time performance. I understand that military and industrial designers make extensive use of FPGAs for these reasons; the throughput isn't necessarily any better than an ordinary processor and the cost is drastically higher, but you have absolute certainty about latency.

[borramakot]

These all seem fair- I've been mostly looking at large scale FPGAs in a data center, a la F1 or Microsoft's Catapult. I hadn't given much thought to use as low-run hardware, at which I'm sure they excel.