[chongli]

He tackles your question during the Q&A. He (and his PhD student, Dan) talk about how so much of the effort to create 'terra firma', as you call it, is caused by the terrible hardware sold to us by Intel. He argues that much of the hardware we have is just software that's been crystallized too early. If he had a machine more like an FPGA he could build all of these abstractions in powerful DSLs right down to the metal.