But you can't get faster hardware cheaper anymore. Not naively faster hardware anyways. You are getting more and more optimization opportunities nowadays though. Vectorize your code, offload some work to the GPU or one of the countless other accelerators that are present on modern SOC, change your I/O stack so you can utilize SSDs efficiently, etc. I think it's a matter of time until someone puts FPGA onto mainstream SOC, and the gap between efficient and mainstream software will only widen from that point.