I spent like a thousand dollars on the box sitting under my desk; I'm pretty sure my C code runs on special hardware too. ;)
(and worth noting: if I pull out the special hardware you're thinking of from that box, my particular thousand-dollar-box is no longer able to run software I need because the GUI requires a graphics accelerator card. The OS authors have already reached for a subset of CUDA to optimize the parts of the GUI that needed optimization).
In my domain, we reach for the CUDA libraries to write the high-performance parts of our code. ;)