I think it will still be a very uphill battle to get such chips integrated anywhere for some very basic reasons: power and heat.
All those extra transistors that allow FPGAs to be reprogrammable also dissipate a lot of heat and use a lot of power (or did back when I was mounting massive heatsinks on custom networking FPGAs).
For a laptop or phone manufacturer if the choice is between an ASIC and an FPGA that consumes 10x the power it is an easy choice. It's not just dollar cost, but power and heating budgets.
CPLDs have been pretty commonplace in complex embedded system designs for a while. They're great for consolidating a bunch of little logic bits into a single package, and allow you to build some control logic using code rather than iterating hardware when you need to make small changes. There's huge advantages for a system like a phone where you are extremely space-constrained, and also with quick turn engineering cycles where the hardware can't go through 6 revisions before being completed. Throw a CPLD or a low-power FPGA like the Lattice ICEstorm series in there and let the HDL do the rest!
That's cool to see, although given the exploding Samsung Galaxy phone situation (probably completely unrelated) I'm not sure their engineering of power consumption/cooling is the best thing to cite. :)
All those extra transistors that allow FPGAs to be reprogrammable also dissipate a lot of heat and use a lot of power (or did back when I was mounting massive heatsinks on custom networking FPGAs).
For a laptop or phone manufacturer if the choice is between an ASIC and an FPGA that consumes 10x the power it is an easy choice. It's not just dollar cost, but power and heating budgets.
In general I love the idea.