would hw acceleration help postgres (databases in general) ?

Hello hackers,

I think i'm at the right place to ask this question.

Based on your experience and the fact that you have written the Postgres code, 
can you tell what a rough break-down - in your opinion - is for the time the 
database spends time just "fetching and writing " stuff to memory and the 
actual computation. The reason i ask this is because off-late there has been a 
push to put reconfigurable hardware on processor cores. What this means is that 
database writers can possibly identify the compute-intensive portions of the 
code and write hardware accelerators and/or custom instructions and offload 
computation to these hardware accelerators which they would have programmed 
onto the FPGA. 

There is not much utility  in doing this if there aren't considerable compute-
intensive operations in the database (which i would be surprise if true ). I 
would suspect joins, complex queries etc may be very compute-intensive. Please 
correct me if i'm wrong. Moreover, if you were told that you have a 
reconfigurable hardware which can perform pretty complex computations 10x 
faster than the base, would you think about synthesizing it directly on an fpga 
and use it ?  

I'd be more than glad to hear your guesstimates.

Thanks alot !


Hamza