That's why I thought of Bluearc - it was a storage system so the overall throughput was ultimately limited by hard disks. The FPGAs were used to optimise all of

That's why I thought of Bluearc - it was a storage system so the overall throughput was ultimately limited by hard disks. The FPGAs were used to optimise all of the front end protocol and filesystem processing. I imagine the same is true of most key-value stores, at scale you're going to have to store the values somewhere slow and optimising key lookups only gains you so much. My impression of FPGAs is that yes, Moore's law does help, but at this point it's mostly by adding transistors. If your design doesn't take advantage of them, don't they just sit idle? Whereas Intel puts a lot of effort into making those extra transistors speed up even single threaded legacy code. Your example of network hardware is interesting where you can keep the whole problem domain local I imagine it's a better use case.