Dolphin-specific hardware acceleration?

[AnyOldName3]

If someone owned a FPGA big enough, it wouldn't be that hard (relative to going through all the work to make a dedicated chip) to make something with verilog or similar, but the FPGA itself would cost a fuckload of money. The Broadway chip in a Wii (without even considering the GPU) has around 2,000,000 transistors, so to be safe I'd say this would need a 2,000,000-gate FPGA, and these are the kind of kit that's so expensive there's no quoted price, and you have to ask. This is the 'easy' solution, and it only solves it for one person.

The hard, but more effective solution would be to design an ASIC that implements the Broadway chip's instruction set exactly, which would not be easier than writing this whole emulator, and then finding someone to make it. If you make tens of millions of a chip, like AMD or nVidia or any other Global Foundries or TSMC charge around $50 for a somewhat complex chip, which isn't too far off the cost of materials and labour, but if you're making fewer chips, then you need to pay to set things up, too, and that'd cost a lot, maybe even more than a licence to start making Broadway processors themselves from IBM.

The long and short of it is that something that multi-billion dollar companies spend years developing and manufacturing is out of the scope of a man in a shed with some knowledge and enthusiasm.