I may or may not have mentioned this somewhere around here...
A long time ago, I read an interesting Sci-Fi book. It was a collection of short stories, but I do not remember the name or the author, sorry.

One idea from one of those stories was that hardware and software complement each other. A good example is e.g. a floating point arithmetics. Older CPUs did not have the hardware to do FP arithmetics and it had to be emulated in software. So you can have either a single FPU instruction and a rather complex hardware to execute it or a simple hardware and a few hundred CPU instructions to achieve the same result, if in a longer time.

Abstracting this idea and taking it to an extreme, you will end up with two limits: 1) and infinitely complex hardware running no software at all, performing the task in zero time and 2) an infinitely complex software running on its own without any hardware, performing the task in an infinitely long time.