Products like this are, generally speaking, designed for service providers, where having more available host capacity directly translates to increased revenue.

Products like this are, generally speaking, designed for service providers, where having more available host capacity directly translates to increased revenue. Consider a cloud provider who offers virtual machines to users: the physical host machine typically is involved in whatever networking path is necessary (e.g. an SDN), as well as the control plane software for managing VMs, and other tidbits. Moving the entire networking and SDN layer off the host system and onto an accelerator card, with your own customizations to the data path, means you can take those host resources and use them for VMs instead -- effectively increasing the total amount of capacity you have available. It's not just CPU time either: things like this also effectively increase available PCIe bandwidth, memory bandwidth, etc, available to users, by moving the resources the operator needs elsewhere. There are some other benefits too, like you can run the whole security framework on a card like this. Or QoS controls. You could for example rent out the entire bare metal server to someone more or less and use a device like this to implement throttling/QoS/SDN transparently. Most of the vendors are calling these "Data Processing Units" or "Infrastructure Processing Units" or whatever, but the idea is all the same. Offloading the networking/data paths into accelerators allows you to offer more raw compute to your users. For example, Nvidia Bluefield or Intel's new Mount Evans IPU. This Mikrotik is basically the bargain-bin version of those products. Which is actually pretty cool. I could actually use a couple of 25GbE breakouts for that price...