@Thomas Davie
You have one in the CPU, it's been that way since the 80486.
The idea that hybrid computing is becoming a mainstream technology was one of the major threads running through SC09 last week. Convey Computer, founded in 2006, has a different take on how to best implement hybrid architectures, to deliver better performance and to simplify use. Its approach is to add an FPGA coprocessor that …
I have a Floating point Coprocessor in my machine, it's just most people would call it a Graphics card.
Seriously though, that's exactly what we're staring at – OpenCL and CUDA make these things into big massively parallel FPUs
I've been saying that's the way forward for YEARS!
Just add an FPGA to do custom parallel processing on the side.
Find a way to combine this on the same chips with SSDs and you have a brand new architecture that can potentially do some bloody awesome things.
You have one in the CPU, it's been that way since the 80486.
Imagine upgrading just your co processor.
Keep your pc a Pentium 2 but have the hardware/software very scaleable for co processors so that 15 co processors later you can up grade that coprocessor to not just a i7 but a i8700(does not exists) that more than a 100000% improvement in speed.
In effect offloading most cpu intensive tasts to the co processor and just leave the main cpu to just move the mouse and opening folders.
If everything had its own coprocessor then computers would be so darn fast!
ARM+GPU = dream super?SC11 NVIDIA: 'Yup, we're on it'
Nvidia's Maximus: Hard-core 3D graphics on speedBlog Quadro-Tesla mashup for animation acceleration