Wireless communications and video kernels contain vast instruction and data level parallelism that can far outstrip programmable high performance DSPs. Hardware acceleration of these bottlenecks is commonly done at the cost of software flexibility. Many vendors, however, view software as intellectual property and prefer a software solution that is a proprietary implementation. The paper uses a research compiler for architectural design space exploration to present comparisons between compiler generated scalable software programmable DSP architectures versus hardware acceleration implementations. It shows that scaled up compiler generated software programmable DSP architectures can be attractive alternatives to non-programmable hardware acceleration.