Convey computer has something that looks like a useful FPGA development model. Basically you move critical sections of your code into the hardware using a hardware description language(with some help from the sdk), and when writing the software , you just call that section almost normally , and convey system manages this transfer of control between cpu and FPGA as needed.

Using that you create a unique "instruction set" that can generally fit a number of applications in the same area. With that programmers can program normally and still benefit from a decent speedup.

BTW it seems that convey has a deal with DELL, and also has developed a memcached acceleration kit. This stuff will probably be available only to big cloud providers, giving them another big advantage on the DIY guys.