And yet, so much software on modern CPUs takes seconds rather than milliseconds to perform and output simple calculations. Especially with the mantra "developer

And yet, so much software on modern CPUs takes seconds rather than milliseconds to perform and output simple calculations. Especially with the mantra "developer time is more expensive than computing power", few developers nowadays have recent experience of optimizing programs for sub-ms reaction times. You could probably make it work with standard hardware. But since developers have to be retrained for that field anyway, why not use hardware that's battle-tested and gives you more leeway? In addition, the advantage of optimizing at every point is that you can use hardware not designed at the limit of what's possible, likely giving you lower error rates.