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In the 90s Auspex sold fileservers that had lots of specialty offload processors. This was before modern GPUs. Then the advantage of functional processors disappeared, and Auspex with it. Later came RDMA, which essentially is akin to having some functional processing in NICs. Anyways. This has been happening for a long time. But CPUs are maxed out for now, I think, so I'd expect that the current cycle will be a long one.

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> But CPUs are maxed out for now, I think, so I'd expect that the current cycle will be a long one.

CPUs in the future may be a mixed bag, there may be different coprocessors, but integrated in the same physical chip - more advanced SoC. At least this picture is what I find to be the most convincing after the end of exponential scaling by Moore's Law.

Heat dissipation is an issue.

Yes. It is already an issue of AVX2, which has the hilarious problem that the user must try finding a net performance gain between speeding things up and heating the CPU into thermal-throttle... But I think if an on-chip coprocessor can offload a common task and making it more energy efficient, the thermal issue can be avoided. We've already seen successful applications of cryptographic instruction sets / coprocessors, video transcoding, and the number can only get bigger.

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