I wonder if there's an economic argument, at useful scales, to using FPGA's in general purpose servers to accelerate network performance. The purpose-built ASICs would win on cost-per-unit every time, but the FPGA would have some adaptability to new protocols or algorithms that the ASIC wouldn't.
Yes, Azure uses FPGAs for networking. Programmable NPUs like Netronome or Pensando are a middle ground that are more cost-efficient than FPGAs for most needs.
I don't know much about the technical details, but the pitch I've heard is that it gives you ASIC level performance with more flexibility to reprogram the chip (not full FPGA).
Yeah, it's an interesting approach. They're basically allowing you to define packet processing with P4 on their Tofino family of chipsets:
https://p4.org/
That said, there's only so much you can do in a chip before considerable tradeoffs are going to be made. They're not going to offer the same level of flexibility you get out of a general purpose CPU, but may not have same the restrictions of most fixed pipeline chips - their product sits somewhere in the middle. Also, P4 seems to sit in a space complex enough to make it unreasonable for most network shops - it's not for your average enterprise or service provider network.
Ive been waiting for mainstream workstation motherboards with this capability for years. Presumably a pci card is how this would be handled in practice for now. My naive take is that toolchains are still too convoluted and bogged down with licensing schemes to deliver the kind of real-time highly integrated adaptability this would require for individual users. Would be great if the barrier to entry has in fact dropped enough that university-sized networks could consider them.
