Custom hardware is actually flourishing in datacenters. My preferred architecture is Cavium Octeon III style of many-core RISC, accelerators for everything, plenty I&#x2F;O, and hypervisor support. Selling like hotcakes. Adapteva&#x27;s stuff outperforms CPU&#x27;s &amp; GPU&#x27;s at performance-per-watt-per-area with sales to HPC people. There&#x27;s similarly at least a few custom hardware companies in each segment doing something that&#x27;s hard or not cost-effective with existing hardware or software.<p>I agree that the risk is high, though, to the point that one shouldn&#x27;t depend on it. So, I&#x27;d advice selling system w&#x2F; services that&#x27;s profitable which just happens to use such custom hardware. A high-performance, easy-to-manage, easy-to-integrate... already worth buying... platform that also has hardware-supported GC and&#x2F;or memory safety. The sales of the system &amp; licensing of the software subsidize hardware costs, which are structured to be cheap anyway. Start with FPGA&#x27;s, then S-ASIC&#x27;s, then advanced S-ASIC&#x27;s or finally ASIC&#x27;s. The NRE stays as low as volume can support.<p>Relevant example of this model (and evidence for my GC idea) is Azul Systems Vega machines. Those are custom hardware for Java supporting native bytecodes, a bunch of RAM, a pauseless GC, and easy enterprise integration. So, while we&#x27;re all speculating, they&#x27;re selling custom hardware w&#x2F; pauseless GC&#x27;s. I&#x27;m just trying to work out a different, cheaper design hopefully integrating with Intel&#x2F;AMD.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.azulsystems.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;vega&#x2F;overview" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.azulsystems.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;vega&#x2F;overview</a><p>Note that they support a whole range of hardware, software, and services to diversify income. Any one thing shouldn&#x27;t sink them, esp unfavorable hardware. That&#x27;s the model to copy.