I think really any task can benefit from being ported to FGPA, but FPGA clocks tend to be slower than CPU clocks and large logic will force you to lower the clock as components become more spread out on the chip (assuming all the logic elements needed even fit on your board). The caveat is that it's expensive to do things in hardware, and some things are already designed very well -- if you need to design a whole CPU from scratch on an FPGA to run your code it'll obviously be slower, but it will also take way too much time to get it anywhere near real world performance per clock. Since TCP/IP and SSL are mostly pretty specialized, the answer is yes. If you're interested, there's some open-source projects that do part of this https://github.com/fpgasystems/fpga-network-stack)
Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards
by jcfrei on Saturday August 08, 2020 @04:15PM
(#24094849)
I'm curious: Would it be worthwhile porting the entire stack required for http(s) (tcp/ip, ssl, etc) to an fpga? Would it be faster than running it on a CPU?
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Disclaimer: not an FPGA expert
Re:Cheap FPGA Development Boards
by imtringued on Saturday August 08, 2020 @04:59PM
(#24095147)
You can make anything faster on an FPGA given a sufficiently powerful FPGA. Just because something is possible doesn't mean you should do it.
Related HN thread from 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11776190