Today, the project uses the fact that there is a FPGA integrated into all of Microsofts new data center server to leverage their distributed architecture. In their description they tout the reconfigurable nature of FGPA's to deliver better performance and efficiency without using custom hardware.
They do note the tradeoffs when comparing this to CPU's: an "order of magnitude" performance gain for the FPGA system but at a 30% increase in cost and under a 10% increase in power use. So it seems as though this team think the flexibility and performance is worth the cost.
Today, the project uses the fact that there is a FPGA integrated into all of Microsofts new data center server to leverage their distributed architecture. In their description they tout the reconfigurable nature of FGPA's to deliver better performance and efficiency without using custom hardware. They do note the tradeoffs when comparing this to CPU's: an "order of magnitude" performance gain for the FPGA system but at a 30% increase in cost and under a 10% increase in power use. So it seems as though this team think the flexibility and performance is worth the cost.