"<i>Setting aside issues like the shortage of available talent and the average of four years to develop and bring a new ASIC to market, the material costs alone are high. The manufacturing of a typical two-gram chip requires 1.6 kilograms of fossil fuel, 72 grams of chemicals, and 32 kilograms of water. The materials involved in making a 32Mbit RAM chip can add up to as much as 630 times the mass of the final product.</i>"<p>You realize that this is replacing a number of general purpose chips and reduces the new amount of materials consumed to accomplish a task, right? If you're not spending those 72 grams of 'chemicals' on your ASIC your spending 720 on general purpose CPUs.
Actually, large data centers are using FPGAs at the network edges. The FGPA does data compression and/or encryption. This optimizes network bandwidth and does not tie up the CPU. I expect to see distributed network routing code so the communication can be peer to peer with no routers. I expect to see firewalls specific to a node (e.g. only web traffic from the traffic splitter). I expect to security code (e.g. no exfiltration from the confidential store-only machine).<p>All of this without involving the CPU... ASIC is too expensive but FPGAs are great. Intel bought Altera (about 45% of the FPGA market) which annoys me / excites me because I use Altera. I expect the next Gen CPUs to have an embedded FPGA so you can make your own instructions.
Networking seems to be moving towards Programable ASICs with companies like Barefoot Networks, Netronome, Cavium, and other developing programable network card, switches, and routers. So yes, its Application Specific to networking, but what the chip actually does with the packets is up the whoever buys it.<p>If Xilinx / Altera can get P4 to compile to their FPGAs (Xilinx has a basic version of this), I suspect the use of FPGAs in networking will become more widespread. FPGAs seem to get higher throughput SerDes before ASICs. Current FPGAs have up to 144x 30Gbps SerDes.
I was quite confused by the article. It's old news. As one of the comments there said:<p><i>Custom ICs for networking were first developed decades ago. Everything from carrier class routers to home routers contain networking ASICs. Cisco and Juniper consume many ASICs.</i>