Field replacement for oscilloscopes & some logic analyzer uses. Software Defined Radio host (the expansion card is in development). Hardware reverse engineering including bus-sniffing something while it's running. Feeding signals into stopped or running hardware to plant new firmware in it. Sniffing crypto keys from running hardware - Bunnie Huang is one of the core Novena people and he was the one who used an FPGA to sniff the Xbox crypto keys to allow Xbox Linux to boot. Keyboard & LCD can be switched at will by a user. The FPGA can be programmed to do many things faster than a general-purpose CPU and can do fast/wide data capture a CPU simply can't keep up with. The expansion slots have room and interface capability that can support a lot of potential new hardware including home-built modules. The list goes on from there, but my fingers are going on from there.
The CPU & graphics are almost more of a programmer convenience than a fundamental selling point. You've got to have them, but they're there to control other things and do some basic number crunching.
The CPU & graphics are almost more of a programmer convenience than a fundamental selling point. You've got to have them, but they're there to control other things and do some basic number crunching.