I reckon that networking is transitioning from being a system programming problem (interrupt - switch to kernel - grab packet - process quickly - switch back) t

I reckon that networking is transitioning from being a system programming problem (interrupt - switch to kernel - grab packet - process quickly - switch back) to being a HPC problem (infinite stream of packets arriving in memory). ISPs are where I expect to see the disruption of HPC-oriented x86 servers being supremely capable of handling work previously done by specialized hardware.