  In this paper, we report on a preliminary investigation of the potential
performance gain of programs implemented in field-programmable gate arrays
(FPGAs) using a high-level language Chisel compared to ordinary high-level
software implementations executed on general-purpose computers and small and
cheap computers. FPGAs inherently support parallel evaluations, while
sequential computers do not. For this preliminary investigation, we have chosen
a highly parallelizable program as a case study to show an upper bound of
performance gain. The purpose is to demonstrate whether or not programming
FPGAs has the potential for performance optimizations of ordinary programs. We
have developed and evaluated Conway's Game of Life for an FPGA, a small and
cheap computer Raspberry Pi 4, and a MacBook Pro Laptop. We have compared the
performance of programs over different input sizes to decide the relative
increase in runtime.
