&quot;This sounds interesting, but why should this be a new piece of hardware as opposed to a new OS service?&quot;<p>Because the entire point is that CPUs are too slow by themselves, even without the OS, let alone with it. While you were context-switching into this OS server you missed the chance to do 10 IOPs give or take an order of magnitude.<p>Yet the OS really can&#x27;t go anywhere. We can sometimes poke a hole here and sometimes poke a hole there but in general they&#x27;re there for good reasons and not going anywhere, just as no matter what crazy things we bodge in to our computers &quot;things like CPUs&quot; aren&#x27;t going anywhere either, and my guess is they&#x27;re likely to stay pretty &quot;central&quot;, too.