Batch processing of network packets

We have got some more mileage out of C++ (which is quite a lot faster than C, for common problems), compiler intrinsics, and shaders, but we may find that a powerful functional language is needed to manage the complexity of what modern hardware can be. (If only the functional-language literati could break their nasty garbage-collection habit!) The biggest opportunities for using what hardware can be made to do depend on values not having or needing addresses, for longer periods. There are blessed moments in C++ when values have no addresses, and we can get a lot done in those moments.

Much of what the hundreds of billions of transistors on CPU chips nowadays do is just keeping this computation from getting in the way of that computation. Remarkably little of them are actually doing the computations themselves. By eliminating the von Neumann hierarchical, addressible memory model, those transistors could be put to work properly -- if only we knew a better way to program them.

"Say what you will about sequential instruction machines, they don't often have a problem deciding what to do in the next cycle."