I agree. With custom hardware, one could drastically increase the performance of many distributed operations. For example, Google's Spanner[1] uses GPS receiver

I agree. With custom hardware, one could drastically increase the performance of many distributed operations. For example, Google's Spanner[1] uses GPS receivers and atomic clocks to ensure global consistency. The current state of distributed systems makes me think of 3D games before Nvidia's GeForce 256. Without dedicated hardware, there was only so much you could do. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner_(database)