[zmanian]

What are the use cases for the FPGA realistically? Then only piece of easily downloaded and installed code is a SHA based crytocoin miner.

[cbsmith]

Actually pretty handy for doing optimized NIC/protocol processing. Particularly handy for wireless stuff IIRC. It's about as close as you can get to a software defined CPU, so the options are kind of limitless.

[zurn]

Learning & prototyping hardware (ASIC) design. Applications that like low latency I/O. You can respond in microseconds with real time guarantees, eg for radio link layer protocols.

[storborg]

Just to toss out a few ideas: software defined radio, high-throughput DSP (like audio processing or machine vision), MITMing of fast protocols, packet inspection, CPU emulation.

[zmanian]

I found http://opencores.org/projects nothing is a killer app right now.

At work I use an FPGA as async real time controller. Not sure what utility that would have if not connected to specialized hardware.