Right, but we don't care about past chips. Moore's law applies to the whole market at the same time, so today's special network chips are still much better at what they do than today's general-purpose chips.
It's kind of stupid to say that today's general-purpose hardware can do what yesterday's special hardware could do at a faction of the cost, because the specialist market has also moved on and wants the performance of today's special hardware.
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and 10 years ago, the compute power of a QC i7 would have tens of thousands of dollars.
Right, but we don't care about past chips. Moore's law applies to the whole market at the same time, so today's special network chips are still much better at what they do than today's general-purpose chips.
It's kind of stupid to say that today's general-purpose hardware can do what yesterday's special hardware could do at a faction of the cost, because the specialist market has also moved on and wants the performance of today's special hardware.