Is this a case of having your cake and eating it too ?
From what I gather, there is a move to use hardware to make data transfer requests quicker. I get that, but if I'm not mistaken there is a global move to have network supervising and management via software - and that includes actually defining the network via software.
Seems to me that these two movements are in opposition with each other. You can't have a software-defined network that relies on hardware-coded optimizations.
Or can you ?