Welcome back, the Front End Processor
There has always been a trade-off between cost and performance between general-purpose and dedicated hardware. Do you want your costly compute hardware constantly servicing interrupts from teletypes and paper tape readers or can you use some lower-cost logic to mitigate the overhead? Does you disk driver need to understand optimal command queuing or can you leave it to the disk hardware?
Data-centre hardware is a very different use case to traditional desktop computing. Clearly you don't need a GPU (at least not for display purposes). But exactly how much of a traditional general-purpose CPU do you actually need when you have very specific roles? Do you need all the elaborate virtual memory support? How much virtualisation is required? Would you be better off with multiple simpler individual CPUs than a small number of complex CPUs that can be virtualised as many? And when it comes to I/O do you really want a "Smart NIC" or would you better off using different network protocols than those that require the twiddling of unaligned bytes?
Clearly manufacturers such as Intel have an interest in promoting dependency on new features, but the shots are ultimately going to be called by the bitbarn barons. I think there is a reasonable chance we're going to see something more like a "dumb CPU" rather than a "Smart NIC" - where the CPU simply executes the workload not the "overhead" and perhaps has some sort of OOB configuration plane used by a remote "hypervisor" so set up the CPU for a specific job with much of what now constitutes low-level I/O abstracted at a much higher level over optimised buses rather than traditional network interconnects.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
