Azul had/has some interesting technology. (They're still around but just do software now.) I had some conversations on this topic broadly at a conference I was speaking at a month or so ago which had more hardware/software overlap than is typical. IMO, we're unlikely to come up with anything else in the near-term that delivered the kind of scaling CMOS process technology did. As a result, it's at least possible that we'll see specialized hardware make more sense in a world where "Moore's Law" won't let general purpose x86 chips just hit the same performance level in a couple of years.