So, about 15 years ago I took a college course on microprocessor design, and our final project was to implement a simple microprocessor on an FPGA.
At the time, it seemed obvious that, over the next decade, FPGA's would work their way into general-purpose computing, so that (for example) Photoshop filters would simply reconfigure the FPGA to run blazingly fast. Likewise with games, or video codecs, or 3D rendering, or whatever else was processor-intensive.
But that clearly hasn't happened. Instead, GPU's took off as the main computational supplement to CPU's.
Does anyone here have any insight as to why? Is there a technological reason why FPGA's never turned into general-purpose hardware standard on every desktop and laptop? Has it been a chicken-and-egg problem? A standardization problem? Or something else? Do FPGA's still have potential for general-purpose consumer computing? Or are they going to be forever relegated to special-purpose roles?
At the time, it seemed obvious that, over the next decade, FPGA's would work their way into general-purpose computing, so that (for example) Photoshop filters would simply reconfigure the FPGA to run blazingly fast. Likewise with games, or video codecs, or 3D rendering, or whatever else was processor-intensive.
But that clearly hasn't happened. Instead, GPU's took off as the main computational supplement to CPU's.
Does anyone here have any insight as to why? Is there a technological reason why FPGA's never turned into general-purpose hardware standard on every desktop and laptop? Has it been a chicken-and-egg problem? A standardization problem? Or something else? Do FPGA's still have potential for general-purpose consumer computing? Or are they going to be forever relegated to special-purpose roles?