The first two companies to offer socket-compatible coprocessors for AMD64 Opteron processor sockets, DRC Computer Corp. and XtremeData Inc., are delivering programmable solutions that can accelerate time-critical algorithms.

These coprocessors leverage the flexibility of Xilinx and Altera FPGAs, respectively, so that they can be configured to accelerate graphics, XML, floating point, video transcoding and other applications.

Read full story @ FPGA-based accelerators boost Opteron

In ideal world, one should be able to plugin an "generic" accelerator card and configure it to enhance computing performance for a given application (s) per requirements. In this ideal solution, there will be a FPGA card which can be dynamically configured and a set of software to analyze the application and configure the FPGA card.

Incidently, this software has to do almost everything, a high level synthesis tool must do. So a ideal High level synthesis tool can have bigger market than thought before!  Probably venture community will be more interested in High level synthesis tools after reading this piece (of crap!).