The article being from 2011 is perhaps why it can be as long as it is without mentioning "Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays", or CGRAs, which, at least as of 2019 when I learned about them, seemed to occupy a good middle ground between conventional CPUs and FPGAs.
The idea is that, instead of being a bunch of gates like an FPGA, the components of the CGRA are at the scale of an ALU, or maybe an on-silicon network switch, with a single CGRA having different parts that are optimized for e.g. numerics, IO, encryption, caching, etc., which you can knit together into the processor you need.
That's maybe where this idea went?
Here's a more recent link covering similar ground:
https://semiengineering.com/specialization-vs-generalization...
The idea is that, instead of being a bunch of gates like an FPGA, the components of the CGRA are at the scale of an ALU, or maybe an on-silicon network switch, with a single CGRA having different parts that are optimized for e.g. numerics, IO, encryption, caching, etc., which you can knit together into the processor you need.
That's maybe where this idea went?
Here's a more recent link covering similar ground:
https://semiengineering.com/specialization-vs-generalization...