Apple's 60W chargers fit, and so do USB docks from Dell / Caldigit / etc. We even have a Legion gaming computer, and that thing's charger is literally wider and longer than a brick.
tools enable people to do more things. those things can increase or decrease productivity. at the end of the day, it's largely defined by individual settings.
examples:
* if you in ops or management, and are in comm mode daily, need calls / messages with your team, this keeps you hooked up to everything going on.
* if you are in engineering or research, and want to go into deep focus, you can use the widgets for things like code, logs, a lofi playlist, etc.
* if you're a degen trader, you can also load up 5 twitter widgets and a stonk chart.
sure if the engineer used a degen trader dashboard, it would be counter productive. Google can't stop me from opening reddit / youtube on my browser, I don't blame them for making me less productive.
How? With the possible exception of the usb dock, I don't see how this desk replaces any of these, except perhaps your monitor -- albeit, with a worse monitor.
basically time and power. FPGAs will most likely be both faster and more power efficient than GPUs and CPUs, the memory point isn't quite relevant, you can have an FPGA board that talks to 32 GB of ram, or an HBM chip with as much memory density and memory bandwidth as a 1080 TI GPU.
If you take apart a gpu and look at the die you can see they basically frankenstein 1 or 2 HBMs with the GPU die. Xilinx is doing this too in their latest line of VU33 - VU38P HBM chips too (4-8GB on chip, 460 GB/s).
Any density upgrades for the GPU will also reflect for FPGAs, but we're physically limited in terms of how many HBM dies you can slap on :(