Definitely. You also have stuff like putting compute into the hardware. I read somewhere about SSDs with on-board compute doing serialization/deserialization of

Definitely. You also have stuff like putting compute into the hardware. I read somewhere about SSDs with on-board compute doing serialization/deserialization of some data structures on the device itself, for instance. You can, in principle, take compute on board a NIC and if you could address the memory controller directly, you could serve NVRAM backed key-value store directly, without the CPU at all. Things are getting mushy and our way of addressing hardware resources and the OS abstractions behind them aren’t up to the task anymore. In the research world, due to various things about the kind of work that is feasible to do and get published in a reasonable timeframe, they just aren’t looking at these bigger questions as deeply as I think they ought to. People do more minor iterations on the existing approaches, which is a pity.