[slededit]

The difference these days is that with the death of Dennard scaling and Moore's law there's a place now for customized hardware. You really can beat Intel and even NVidia now for specialized workloads with FPGAs. Of course you'd be even better with an ASIC which is why we're leaning that way.

[someguydave]

Intel sees this threat which is why they are working to glue an altera asic onto the xeon core. I don't think it's likely they will succeed though.