[gateorade]

The primary benefit of FPGAs is not to be an alternative type of computing hardware to cpus or gpus but to do things that neither of them are particularly good at. Mainly producing some output for some input or series of inputs with extremely low latency (like in the single digit nanoseconds). This is what ASICS are usually used for but FPGAs come in handy when it doesn’t make sense to spend a million plus dollars spinning your own asic. FPGAs are good for things like building digital transceivers, extremely precise synchronization systems, or industrial/scientific/medical applications where you need to sequence various effectors/sensors/etc. with extremely tight timing.

Since they are just general digital logic machines they can be obviously implement a cpu and are great are parallel computation, but in most cases cpus and gpus are much better at general computation because they’re specifically designed for that task.