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Fun fact: Samsung made some SSDs ("SmartSSD") with an embedded programmable FPGA and one of the demos was using it along a modified version of postgresql to offload filtering and scans to the storage itself: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~jignesh/publ/SmartSSD.pdf https://www.xilinx.com/publications/product-briefs/xilinx-sm...

Though it looks like they didn't follow up on these and can't find them for sale

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Yeah, I remember seeing those. It felt really promising. I have no idea why they didn't continue in this direction.

The company I talked to explained the use of FPGA by saying that FPGAs are offered by major cloud vendor, and so are a commercially viable direction. While making their own dedicated chips is not only a lot more expensive, but also doesn't have a lot of customers (people don't want to maintain their own h/w, especially of a bespoke variety). The bespoke part might be why Samsung didn't pursue the idea. Essentially, if eg. AWS doesn't buy this from you and makes it an offering that customers may reasonably rely on, it's too hard to sell.

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