Summary form only given. We have searched for a performance platform to run billions of simulations in the cellular automata model for optimizing applications. The question was how much speed-up could be gained by using the FPGA technology compared to optimized software. We have implemented to cellular automata rules in software on a PC and in hardware. On our low end experimental platform we reached a speed-up of 3 for a medium complex rule and 22 for a complex rule. If we would use the latest high end FPGA technology, speed-ups up to many thousand are realistic. A cluster of thousands of workstations would be necessary to reach the same performance, which is much more costly than the FPGA solution.