What are the limits to the “changeability” of FPGA chips?

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My understanding of FPGAs is that they are chips which can implement the designs of other chips as desired. Is there a limit to the types of instruction set architectures and/or complexity that FPGAs can implement? For example, could a single FPGA chip implement an x86 ISA and then an ARM ISA? And hypothetically, within an ARM implementation, could a FPGA chip implement the equivalent of, say, an older chip like the Apple A4 and a newer, more complex one like the Apple M2?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

In general, no. FPGA are significantly slower while occupying more real estate than ASIC to perform the same function. As a result, they’re either used for development purposes or for low volume/high cost applications.

So you can probably use a top notch modern FPGA to implement a decades-old processor (think 8088 or 6502) fairly well. But almost any modern processor, you’d either run out of fabric and/or the clock rate would be unacceptably slow.

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