Bing announced they are going to get faster, twice as fast to be exact.
Microsoft said:
For the first time ever, the quality of Bing’s page ranking will be driven not only by great algorithms but also by hardware - incredibly advanced hardware that can be made more highly specialized than anything ever seen before at datacenter scale.
Wired reports:
The FPGAs are 40 times faster than a CPU at processing Bing’s custom algorithms, Berger says. That doesn’t mean Bing will be 40 times faster–some of the work is still done by those Xeon CPUs–but Microsoft believes the overall system will be twice as fast as Bing’s existing system.
This is similar maybe to Caffeine in terms of speeding up the search results. Although, Caffeine was less about the hardware, I believe, and more about the internal infrastructure of the code, data and so forth.
When will this roll out? Unsure, but they are testing it.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.