This is non-sequitur, mainstream hardware has only evolved as well so why would there need to be a "forget everything you know" revolution? Conversely, is hard

This is non-sequitur, mainstream hardware has only evolved as well so why would there need to be a "forget everything you know" revolution? Conversely, is hardware research dead? The biggest change from 2000 is prevalence of NUMA, and this was even available back then in SGI and Sequent/IBM systems. I don't understand why systems software would have to substantially change until something like memristors drastically change systems architecture. For a while there has been less emphasis on individual systems and more effort put into distributed systems.. first with Hadoop style clusters and we're now breaking into Mesos style clusters that provide OS-like semantics and services over a network of systems. But there's a lot of good systems research going on today. Some of it is additive, some subtractive, but it's exists and is important.