[_yosefk]

TFA author. How does the word "dispatching" hint at the order of magnitude of anything? What orders of magnitude do depend on is your competition. Outdoing a CPU at operation X is easier than outdoing a GPU at X [assuming the GPU does X reasonably well] which is easier than outdoing a DSP at X [assuming the DSP does X reasonably well]. If your competition is reasonably optimized programmable accelerators, your opportunities to beat it start shrinking.

Source: my day job

[alain94040]

For me, dispatching refers to a very specific piece of the CPU micro-architecture, by far not the most complex or largest area. So by focusing on "dispatching", you make it sound like the overhead is small. Maybe you meant to use another word.

My point stands that from a silicon area perspective, 99% of the CPU is overhead when all you need is a fixed function.

Based on your background, I know you know that. A lot of details in the article show that you know what you are talking about and have specific use cases in mind. I can guess those and for those the article is correct.