Did you say $9500? For that price, I can probably buy several Barcelonas and set up a quad quad core system that will eat it alive and spit out the socket.

Too late to the market? By a couple of years.

$9500 is not that big of a deal. Sure, it'll set you back some. But given the cost, plus power and cooling and rack space you'd need for equivalent performance out of general purpose processors (for a very specialized application), it may well turn out to be a bargain. Obviously, this throws these out of contention to be accelerators for your web server. Odds are that you aren't doing something that mathematically intensive to need one of these anyway. If you're simulating nuclear explosions, however (or, y'know, listening in on citizen's encrypted transmissions), the performance you can get out of the Xylinx part with good custom configuration can blow away a rack of GPPs.