Flow Computing has developed a new computing architecture that combines parallel processing units with CPUs. By reducing the overhead of parallelization, the company claims it can effectively make a CPU 100 times faster.

Valtonen’s goal is to put CPUs back in their rightful, ‘central’ role. In order to do that, he and his team are proposing a new paradigm. Instead of trying to speed up computation by putting 16 identical CPU cores into, say, a laptop, a manufacturer could put 4 standard CPU cores and 64 of Flow Computing’s so-called parallel processing unit (PPU) cores into the same footprint, and achieve up to 100 times better performance. Valtonen and his collaborators laid out their case at the IEEE Hot Chips conference in August.