In fact, if you know of ANY general purpose hardware that will talk to gigasample ADCs/DACs, I'd love to know about it.
In fact, if you know of ANY general purpose hardware that will talk to gigasample ADCs/DACs, I'd love to know about it.
The only thing an FPGA wins on is NRE (non-recurring engineering).
The real problem is that the giga-sample DAC's/ADC's aren't willing to speak one of the actual high-speed interfaces or put a DSP directly on the ADC/DAC. So, everybody needs to use an FPGA to shoehorn the data into a useful form.
If somebody put an actual DSP on their ADC/DAC, FPGA's would evaporate for this application like they have evaporated for so many others.
Any FPGA application with volume eventually gets subsumed by special purpose hardware on a microcontroller. For example, people used to use FPGA's for PWM, motor control, etc. Now those blocks are standard on microcontrollers.
That is EXACTLY the reason to use an FPGA. I use them all the time for projects like that.
This is different from the software people who want a magically flexible brain for generic tasks.