[Lramseyer]

Another point about HFT - They're mostly using FPGAs (some use custom silicon) which means that they have much tighter control over how DRAM is accessed and how the memory controller is configured. They could implement this in hardware if they really need to, but it wouldn't be at the OS level.

[snizovtsev]

Not really. FPGAs run some simple proven strategies, but hardware guys can't keep up with how fast quants iterate on new strategies - so CPUs stay relevant.