I don't agree with the tone of the article. Doing complex functions in hardware is a lot cheaper, often by 100X, compared to doing them in software.
As an extreme case, to do a simple 32-bit add, you light up tens of millions of transistors if the addition goes through a CPU pipeline. The adder itself of course only requires a few transistors...
Saying that "specialization saves dispatching costs" is minimizing the savings by orders of magnitude. Of course, the article is correct in pointing out that hardware doesn't make things free.
As an extreme case, to do a simple 32-bit add, you light up tens of millions of transistors if the addition goes through a CPU pipeline. The adder itself of course only requires a few transistors...
Saying that "specialization saves dispatching costs" is minimizing the savings by orders of magnitude. Of course, the article is correct in pointing out that hardware doesn't make things free.
[source: my day job]