Thoughts on software-defined silicon

>Many of us no longer purchase and run our own servers; we rent them from a cloud provider (and, to the tell the truth, are often better off for it).

With dedicated machines, you get all the features. If a higher-value component is inserted, you get to keep the benefit. Think of storage: it fails, and models go out of production, and the hoster's warehouse may be out of stock on a particular historic item. Having a 500GB SSD replaced with a 512GB model comes to mind.