| HN Mirror

Custom hardware is actually flourishing in datacenters. My preferred architecture is Cavium Octeon III style of many-core RISC, accelerators for everything, plenty I/O, and hypervisor support. Selling like hotcakes. Adapteva's stuff outperforms CPU's & GPU's at performance-per-watt-per-area with sales to HPC people. There's similarly at least a few custom hardware companies in each segment doing something that's hard or not cost-effective with existing hardware or software.

I agree that the risk is high, though, to the point that one shouldn't depend on it. So, I'd advice selling system w/ services that's profitable which just happens to use such custom hardware. A high-performance, easy-to-manage, easy-to-integrate... already worth buying... platform that also has hardware-supported GC and/or memory safety. The sales of the system & licensing of the software subsidize hardware costs, which are structured to be cheap anyway. Start with FPGA's, then S-ASIC's, then advanced S-ASIC's or finally ASIC's. The NRE stays as low as volume can support.

Relevant example of this model (and evidence for my GC idea) is Azul Systems Vega machines. Those are custom hardware for Java supporting native bytecodes, a bunch of RAM, a pauseless GC, and easy enterprise integration. So, while we're all speculating, they're selling custom hardware w/ pauseless GC's. I'm just trying to work out a different, cheaper design hopefully integrating with Intel/AMD.

http://www.azulsystems.com/products/vega/overview

Note that they support a whole range of hardware, software, and services to diversify income. Any one thing shouldn't sink them, esp unfavorable hardware. That's the model to copy.