Networking seems to be moving towards Programable ASICs with companies like Barefoot Networks, Netronome, Cavium, and other developing programable network card,

Networking seems to be moving towards Programable ASICs with companies like Barefoot Networks, Netronome, Cavium, and other developing programable network card, switches, and routers. So yes, its Application Specific to networking, but what the chip actually does with the packets is up the whoever buys it. If Xilinx / Altera can get P4 to compile to their FPGAs (Xilinx has a basic version of this), I suspect the use of FPGAs in networking will become more widespread. FPGAs seem to get higher throughput SerDes before ASICs. Current FPGAs have up to 144x 30Gbps SerDes.