Video encoding is a good example. NGCodec makes FPGA based video encoders:

https://ngcodec.com/

I'm just guessing that if the only thing that given box is doing is handling very specific internal S3 API, you can probably optimize a few things over a multi-purpose architecture.

I'm totally blue and I'll be honest - when I want to learn about something, it seems that stating some thesis gets me way more information from HN vs asking a question, especially when it turns out to be wrong ;)

This is a horrendously disrespectful way to learn about a niche area. I'm shocked to see it laid out so plainly like that.

Your first assertion here is incredibly wrong. ISA's don't split up as cleanly as your fictional version, a NAS box has to support all the same branch, arithmetic, and memory operations as a "multi-purpose" architecture. The only conceivable things you'd bolt on would be things like NEON accelerators for AES, and there's better ways to do that than mucking about with the ISA.

Do you get folks coming back for a second reply after this charade is made apparent?

Only replying to the claim of disrespect. I think the disclaimer, as included, in a post positing a thesis is not disrespectful at all. gp clearly laid out that they were not an expert but had an assumption.

I will agree though that done without a disclaimer gp would have been disrespectful.

disclaimer should have been in the first post, not a reply to a reply long after the confident assertions over what a "storage" CPU must do.

And yet, here he/she gets exactly the result they were looking for. It's a well known online trope that you get your question answered faster and more thoroughly by posting a wrong answer first rather than plainly asking. My guess is it triggers something primal in us geeks.

See: https://xkcd.com/386/

It's still incredibly disrespectful way to approach a community, and all of these replies ignore the thrust of my question about the expert re-upping after this ruse has been made apparent.

Comboy spread a lot of disinformation in the first post, like "I'm surprised there's still not much effort to make FPGAs more affordable and base everything on it." before the lie was laid bare. Looking forward to arguing with "FPGA experts" who harken back to that post as their primary source.

That trope is called Cunningham‘s law: https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law