Let me rephrase that, of course they will survive politically. People
built these tools and if built, they will be use but will they survive
efficiently? In the future, if a particular specialized architecture
is somewhat better than the rest on it's own merit for a particular
need while the stock architecture is reaching a
point of low returns for all the energy put into it - could the
specialized architecture reach a point where it becomes useful? Could
there be a competitive advantage to specialized architecture if
Moore's Law were to go away?
There is now, in some narrow specializations. GPUs and DSP come to mind --- while both are also done on commodity CPUs to some extent, the specialized architectures are used where speed is of the essence. (DSP started out on specialized architectures, but many commodity uses are on commodity architectures these days, reserving the specialized ones to those niches that require them.)