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I’m not convinced it offers better cogs actually. You can do line speed on CPU with DPDK these days and even relatively beefy CPUs are probably cheaper than a specialized hardware like a xilinx card.

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I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and the conclusion I reached is while the cpu may be cheaper, it can generate revenue where the fpga cannot. So even thought the tco may seem upside down the opportunity cost of using a few cores makes up for the additional cost.

Gcp for example has the potential for ~1 k revenue per core over a system lifespan. A smart nic is probably ~1.5k, so saving 2 cores outs you in the black and has other security advantages.

Not sure if you mean this in purely making accounting look good sense but I’m not following - usually you get fixed $$ budget not cpu count budget. Therefore buying all cpus will actually make workload cores cheaper due to higher volume discount.

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