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It's called a FPGA; a software defined microprocessor (most higher tier processors can be reprogram to a certain extent through microcode, but a FPGA is a specialised chip designed specifically for this). You can get ridiculously high performance for your specific application, but it will never excel at general purpose computing. Good enough for Forth, great for ML, DSP, and number crunching, bad for running random apps from GitHub.

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I've used FPGAs before (also ages ago). I guess I could create a simple chip on an FPGA and run a Forth on that, but I was thinking something more physical.

But would you not need to use an FPGA anyway for experimentation and prototyping? If you want something more physical, fast and small you need a spot at an actual fab. There is no other alternative. You might also want to take a look at the "Minimal Fab" technology. I found out about it a year or so ago and it looked really interesting!

Thank you!

I find it kind of funny that majority of uses of FPGA is indeed to implement a simple CPU (basically a programmable state machine), and the problem at hand is then solved by writing a program for it.

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