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Special purpose silicon is almost always faster and offloading stacks of IO cycles from the main cores is definitely a great thing.

Latency matters. You can execute instructions much faster from firmware on the SSD and higher abstraction level instruction usually translates to many low level instructions.

Not necessarily, but often enough that the most expensive part in a mid range or high end gaming PC is an accelerator card meant to offload certain forms of computation that the CPU can't do as fast...

Or perhaps the h.264/h.265 codecs built into modern CPUs and GPUs?

And this isn't at all a new phenomenon, either. We've been using accelerators and coprocessors (as they were often originally known) for decades.