Emphatic second for the Affinity recommendation. The three products are extremely easy to use and have a consistent look and feel. I bought the books for Photo and Designer and never used them because 99% of the features are intuitive and every time I got stuck someone on the very active user forum set me straight. Also, the tutorials and how-to videos are excellent. You can buy a Windows laptop and all three Affinity products for less than one year’s subscription to Adobe.
Another FPGA sweet spot is analyzing TB/PB-scale databases. Netezza programmed FPGAs to uncompress, project, restrict (including NULLs), enforce isolation & visibility and check CRCs at disk scan rates (>200MB/sec). When touching a handful of columns from a 20-200 column table, CPUs spend most of their time stalled on cache line misses. FPGA-projecting just those few columns into memory enormously increases cache hit rates.
