What are some practical applications of an FPGA?

Question

I\'m super excited about my program powering a little seven-segment display, but when I show it off to people not in the field, they always say \"well what can you do with it?\"

Answer 1

I like this article: http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-07-13/jp_morgan_buys_into_fpga_supercomputing.html

My feeling is that FPGA's can sit directly in your streaming data at the point where it enters your the systems under your control. You can then crunch that data without going through the steps a GPGPU would require (bringing the data in off the network, passing it across the PCI Express bus and crunching it a Gb at a time).

There are good reasons for both, but I think the notion of whether you mind buffering the data is a good bellwether.

Here's another cool FPGA application:

https://ehsm.eu/m-labs.hk/m1.html