The idea is pretty closely correlated to the really high end cadence style hardware emulators. Those tend to be made out of a sea of tiny ascetic processors that only know logic ops rather than LUTs, AFAIK.

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.

> 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...

Agreed, FPGA would be my go-to solution as well. Although FPGAs certainly can't touch gigahertz+ range yet. Even 500 MHz is... challenging.

There has been the Achronix Speedster 22i HP(high performance), which was said to reach 1Ghz, produced by Intel at 22nm. That is now out of production, it seems.

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 :-(

> Although FPGAs certainly can't touch gigahertz+ range yet. Even 500 MHz is... challenging.

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.