It used to be the conventional wisdom that domain-specific ASICs were unlikely to take off because of the economics -- the cost of fab time for the small feature sizes (meaning an expensive fab) and small batch sizes mean that the unit cost would be astronomical, and you'd end up not beating the price/performance of general-purpose chips, which don't peform as well, but have unbeatable unit costs because, being general purpose, they are produced by the billions.

The exceptions were GPUs, where there is enough of a mass market, and maybe super-high-value-added niches, like aerospace, where high unit costs are not a deal-breaker.

The article seems to get there, in the TCO section, but it looks to me like maybe genomics is another niche, where there's enough demand to make the economics work.

I had some hope that maybe fab technology was saturating enough that fab access was getting cheaper, maybe driven by SoCs for phones and all those ARM devices and RPis and stuff, that a new era of awesome ASICs was at hand. This appears not to be the case.