Re: Lots of handwaving and metaphoring in this article
It isn't a new trend. Back in 1987 I was working on the functional design of an ASIC to be closely coupled to a SPARC processor to offload arithmetic functions that were too time consuming to do in software. Going back further to 1982 I designed hardware that used a maths co-processor coupled to a Z80 processor which need more computation horsepower to do curve fitting.
Also I "think" the ARM core was available in ASIC libraries from at least the early nineties. Since then there have been numerous implementations of hardware assisted ARM based systems, so this really isn't anything new.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
