I'd be skeptical about whether it beats an FPGA.
So it would seem they beat FPGAs in some niches.
I question the 80ghz number given by the grandparent though. Looking at visual 6502 you're not going to get a order of better magnitude fanout on that design.
Better fanout than what?
The most useful thing I could find was this old article, but it certainly suggests that the room is there to expand: https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/indium-ph...
I am angry for not having bought at least the 22i HD(high density) development kit, when it was available for 999USD for a time. But the software license was only valid for a year, so no-go.
They now offer embeddable FPGA IP cores targetting 750Mhz on TSMCs 7,12&16nm process.
And 'normal' FPGAs, the Speedster 7t, manufactured by TSMC at 7nm, also 750Mhz fmax.
All rather expensive and out of reach for the hobbyist :-(
It's a relative difference though, that depends on what material you're building the circuit in. If you can build an FPGA to run at 1/10th the speed of a 6502, then with a sufficiently expensive process you get a tradeoff between a very weak 80GHz processor and a customizable 8GHz circuit.
> Such a chip would replace 16 5GHz cores for more mainstream computation,...
80 GHz 6502 would be about as fast as... 1 GHz x86 in integer operations, and even that is being generous.
Floating point would be several orders of magnitude worse than even that.
Typical X86 can do 64 8-bit SIMD operations per clock, 2x AVX2 instructions retired in a single clock cycle. At over 4 GHz.
But it'd sure be a beast in real-time applications... assuming signal integrity is a solvable problem.