That is indeed a small FPGA.

There are big FPGAs that cost many thousands of $.

Medium-size FPGAs, which may cost a few hundreds of $, have a few hundred thousand LUTs.

An evaluation board for the medium-to-small ECP5 FPGA is $100.

FWIW, 85k 4-input luts is huge by the standards of any softcore with "micro" in the name.

It comfortably surpasses the capacity of most of the Actel aerospace FPGAs that I tend to work with.

And I think it's so "micro" that the majority of all of Lattice's FPGAs wouldn't fit it either.

And the Lattice ECP5 is advertised with 85k LUTs, which would seemingly limit its use to edification as instantiating this softcore would consume the entire chip. For any other purpose if you wanted a chip that was only a CPU, you would buy a CPU.

The Lattice ECP5 must have been just an example, because in the Github repository there is another example about how to run Linux on it on a 33000 logic cell Artix FPGA board, so I assume that the core must take significantly less than 30000 cells.

Any PowerPC core, even a relatively small one like this, is much more powerful than the soft cores that are used in FPGAs when minimum size is desired.

There are also a few other bigger open-source POWER cores, which can be used for higher performance.

...could be named for how much space is left after that soft core has been instantiated.