Even more mindboggling: the unreleased Stratix 10 FPGA from Altera claims to have 5,510,000 LUTs in the largest device.
That's a total of 17,889 Intel 8088 Microprocessors.
That's a total of 17,889 Intel 8088 Microprocessors.
...That said, that's crazy impressive.
This stream of maybe a TByte/sec of data will then be filtered and decimated/downconverted in real time by racks full of DSP/FPGA boards. Here's a picture of one board used for an Australian facility:
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/news/newsletter/oct06/CABB.htm
5x Virtex II XC2VP50 (23,616 slices, 2 PowerPC CPU blocks, $1700 each)
5x Virtex 4 XC4VSX55 (15,360 slices, $1300 each)
Yes, an ASIC might be more energy efficient and could be made faster, but FPGAs give you the flexibility to adapt your algorithms and filter topologies. And an ASIC run might cost you half a million dollars whereas with FPGAs you only spend ~15'000$/board.