[sixdimensional]

Most likely I believe the answer is yes. But since these appliances have been proprietary, not much is publicly known about what they do internally. I suspect that some design like the one we are seeing here at Baidu has been their secret sauce for some time.

[miguelbar]

It's no secret. Netezza has been using FPGAs since the beginning. Here is a link to a paper that describes the Netezza approach: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4725.pdf

The Baidu approach seems very similar.