what about FPGAs allows these operations to be more power efficient on than A GPU or even CPU? Could you elaborate. I found your statement interesting. Thanks.
Essentially, FPGAs are as "close to the metal" as you can get - they are the metal - which means you can configure circuits that utilize the minimal number of 'gates' needed to go from a specific set of allowable input to a specific set of allowable output.
To make a programmable gate, however, requires more power-inefficient transistor designs, usually using more transistors than an equivalent gate on a general purpose CPU (e.g. a programmable gate set to be an OR gate will be less efficient than an OR-only gate).
FPGAs are therefore more power-hungry per gate, but since you don't need the overhead of transistors that can process arbitrary input to arbitrary output, you can make them very efficient for particular tasks.
