[nanomonkey]

My experience is that ASICs are used for a variety of scenarios, such as consolidating components used in circuit design. Current limiters for LEDs or signal processing are two examples. They are also useful for replacing processes that were previously done in software or on FPGAs in such a way that they perform with more efficiency. None of these scenarios necessitate performance, and the latest node size. Hell in the open source community an open architecture without proprietary device drivers(blob free) is often quite desirable.