These are properly called "GPUs", as in "Grep Processing Units"!

It would be cool if they could be daisy-chained, so you can have a hardware implementation of |

The return of the Transputer.

Put a Transputer in a Lego brick. Not "like a Lego brick", an actual Lego brick. Turn the notches into connectors for the serial link.

Plug'n'play.

The next logical step would be to have a separate card for each Unix utility.

And a patch panel and a bunch of patch cables that you plug in and out to construct your pipelines.

And eventually hire people whose job it is to patch pipelines on demand for everyone in the office.

“Hey Jim, I’m gonna output the systemd logs of nginx on line five, can you assemble a grep pipeline for me to match all HTTP 500 status codes from /api/cart POST request log lines? Connect the filtered output to Tim’s desk, line 7. He’s there now, we are trying to figure something out.”

“Sure thing Bob, give me a moment.”

It’s OK: you can just tell us you have a financially and relationally crippling Eurorack addiction. You’re amongst friends here.

I'm sure this is how some bellheads (in the phone tradition, not in the Unix tradition) envisioned computing.

Now if that isn’t a great Zachlike game mechanic. Playing as the patch pipeline builder.

Patching cables is so primitive... Use punched cards to define the connection patterns or something!

Somehow we’ve reinvented punch cards, but worse.

It was a companion of punchcards, the tabulating machine. Programming by wires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine#Selected_mo...

Bring back IBM accounting machine plugboards!

Transputerpunk.

I cannot wait for my cowsay coprocessor.

And a datacenter for Emacs.

At some point Intel was experimenting a Xeon with built-in FPGA, maybe they were just a bit too early to the game :)

Almost 30 years ago there was a project about making a computer which used FPGAs for all "software". It was called RAW.

Baring it all to software: Raw machines | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore https://share.google/nI9GyFJu4HvbYFrBf

(If you Google the name you will find free PDFs as well, the IEEE page is more useful as a summary and such.)

I look forward to GPGrepPU -- someone'll find a way to abuse them for scientific workloads or something.

GrePU

I wonder how close you can get with Nvidia's GPUDirect. Hook the fast NVME directly up to the GPU (well, it gets direct DMA to GPU at any rate), then implement parallel grep in CUDA... profit?

Universal Basic ASICs

If your BASIC is compiled that's just a CPU!