We have searched for a performant platform to run billions of simulations in the Cellular Automata model for optimizing applications. The question was how much speedup 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 speedup 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.