This is all high-memory stuff though, so in the physical world it's all limited by cache speed and memory bus speed. And that generally is limited by branch pr

This is all high-memory stuff though, so in the physical world it's all limited by cache speed and memory bus speed. And that generally is limited by branch prediction. So branch prediction is the area where a custom FPGA for SQL could see improvements. Hard-wiring operators is a minor improvement but really not much because compared to memory access it's not the bottleneck.