In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Robert Roe writes that FPGAs provide an early insight into possibile architectural specialization options for HPC and machine learning. “Architectural specialization is one option to continue to improve performance beyond the limits imposed by the slow down in Moore’s Law. Using application-specific hardware to accelerate an application or part of one, allows the use of hardware that can be much more efficient, both in terms of power usage and performance.”