[cbd1984]

Frankly, I'm kind of interested in the prospect of specialized hardware coming back.

The trend since the mid-1980s, when the Intel 80386 was introduced, has been for specialized chips to be replaced due to commodity chips beating them comprehensively in single-core speed; problems which once required specialized hardware and core designs were either solved or obviated by massive improvements in scalar hardware.

Now that this brute force method is starting to peter out, we might see a rise of new, specialized designs once again, to solve specific problems which gain substantial speedups from very specific kinds of parallelism. Systolic arrays are one example. We're already doing something like this by pressing GPUs into service as computational hardware, but it can go farther.

[Inthenameofmine]

This is definitely already starting to happen.

Modern server CPUs have FPGAs in them. I was able to speed up Blockchain transaction signing and verification by 2 order of magnitude by utilizing the Intel in-build FPGAs.

Mobile phone SoCs already have semi-specialized processors in them. Microsoft's Hololens has something what they call "HPU" Holographic Processing Unit. Google just made public that they have a TensorFlow ASIC. Google's phone radar thingy has it's own ASIC if I'm not mistaken.