@PawelK The deeper I go the more I see FPGAs being the solution. Unfortunately I've never had the opportunity to use a FPGA. I keep seeing Xlinix and Altera popping up in electronics. I know what they are capable of and I want to play with them.

They are being used in projects to develop open wifi adapters, open graphics and some other cool areas. The efficiency is getting better and something is going to be needed to deal with acceleration on RISC architectures. One could increase the complexity of the RISC processors but they are better off running the less complicated instructions as fast as possible. An FPGA could effectively be the coprocessor for the more complex logic and run as fast as it can. Two different heat zones and hardware doing what it is best at.

It sounds dumb but one hypersonic missile allegedly uses a RISC design and an FPGA for terrain mapping and following terrain at Mach 5. It might not sound like a big deal but one mile per second of complex readings and controls that are needed IRT puts it far ahead of anything I've ever seen.

This arms race is actually going to be challenging enough to be fun.