While I agree with some of what you say, I cannot help but disagree completely with:>/p>
Something optimized specifically for compilers and modern programming languages.
Such ideas are a complete waste of machine resources, ram, registers, and cpu cycles et al. "Modern Languages" have to do more than should ever be required to account for programmer laziness. Dynamic typing? Takes up huge amounts of resources to have to constantly figure out what the type of EVERY variable it encounters. Virtual Machines? More splitting of cpu time because none of those "modern" languages know how to deal w/multiple cores, hell we barely have languages that can deal with multiple cpu's as it is.
FSB speeds rarely, if ever, exceed 450MHZ and then the cpu is in a pretty much constant wait state for data. Disk I/O is still pretty damn slow when compared to everything else. SSD's have contributed a large amount in improving that but they still make the whole system wait. Network I/O still crawls in comparison unless you are using very specialized and very expensive technology that is mostly reserved for things like mainframes ( think IBM's Deep Blue ).
I dream of going back to big full height drives with the sort of data densities we have now backed down a couple of notches. Separate read and write heads. Elevator seeking and writing so that you can read in a terabyte on one rotation. Running on a parallel buss that clocks a byte of data onto the buss every clock cycle and connected by fiber optics.
Just imagine 64 or 128 fiber strands connecting every component. Experimental rates are over 100 terabytes per second, for a single fiber!!!!! Imagine even just 10% percent of that inside your machine! Your bus capable of signaling at 10 TBS!!! The CPU would be the component everyone is waiting for!!!
Now just imagine a machine that with a very efficient language like C without all the cruft that things like Java, Python, PHP and all those other "modern" bring to the table.
And of course one must imagine what a Beowulf cluster of those would be like...