Quote from: DemosMirak on June 19, 2014, 08:34:00 AM

http://gigaom.com/2014/06/18/intel-will-offer-a-customizable-chip-to-keep-data-center-clients-happy/

Interesting development or not? I know nothing about FPGAs, except that they're the third step in the mining device chain, if I'm not mistaken (CPU -> GPU -> FPGA -> ASIC).

I'm not sure it will effect the mining community too much. This is going to be big news for places doing any sort of virtualization, especially network layer. Hardware network gear makes heavy use of FPGAs/ASICs to handle the majority of the routing/switching that goes on in the platform and the CPU is really just there to observe things. VMWare (maybe others...we're a VMWare shop) came out with NSX that handles a lot of networking in software, it's really flexible but it means the CPU on each server is having to handle those route/switch operations. If you could off-load that work to a FPGA you get back CPU time and can start getting into the 40-100GB+ realm with decent latency.

You might also see them used to handle crypto needs for things like SSL/password hashing/other offload needs. CPU time is still the reason some people are using RC4 when dealing with SSL or SHA1+salt hashing passwords stored in a DB. A general purpose device that could accelerate all those operations, allow for stronger algorithms AND reduce CPU overhead is a win for all parties.