>> You need to build your own ASIC > Might be the reason why Intel is putting FPGAs in the latest Xeons: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-

>> You need to build your own ASIC > Might be the reason why Intel is putting FPGAs in the latest Xeons: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab.. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12773/intel-shows-xeon-scalab.... This is an excellent example. As things are trending, I would expect FPGA and other hardware programming to become more common. I would not be surprised if in a few years websites and browsers start doing their own FPGA optimizations. Adding FPGA programmibility does not increase real raw performance, it just allows developers to do optimizations they would not otherwise be able to do. Along this line of thinking, you would expect developers to start moving away from slower scripting languages towards faster compiled languages. This has not happened yet at any large scale, largely because the huge demand of digital services has placed a premium on developer productivity over application speed. However, this trend is happening on the edges (e.g., using C-based Numpy within Python, the steady rise of Go). If computer performance remains as flat as it has been, I predict we'll start seeing more popular libraries rewritten in faster compiled languages (and eventually FPGAs/ASICs) within the next 5 years.