[sargun]

Err, I think the question is a little bit more complicated than that. You can run various "Soft IP" cores on FPGAs, and then run Linux, or whatever you want on that. I believe right now, OpenRISC, and RISC-V cores are some of the most exciting developments in the field, although you can get OpenSPARC, and MIPS cores as well.

If you want to have "hardware-optimization" in your HTTP server, I think you'd probably, rather than implement a Ethernet, TCP, L7 HTTP/1.1 stack from scratch use a combination of hard IP and soft IP. I imagine the places where a webserver is bottlenecked is well known -- you could extend the ISA, or have additional cores to help out with that part of the workload, and then run the rest on hard IP.

I think the biggest problem right now is programmability, and moving bits between x86 processors and FPGAs. I hope Intel's acquisition is fruitful and we see some FPGA on CPUs.