"Green" Supercomputer? Great Scot!

[Tricky]

Is this for real? Why isn't it making more headlines?

A supercomputer 10 times more energy efficient and up to 300 times faster than its traditional equivalents has been unveiled in Scotland. Called Maxwell, the computer has been built at the University of Edinburgh and uses field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) in place of conventional processors.
Its Scottish developers believe Maxwell represents a new generation of compact and energy-efficient computers. Unlike ordinary general-purpose processors, FPGA chips can be programmed to perform very specific tasks. Once that programming is accomplished, FPGA chips can be much faster than performing the same tasks in software running on general-purpose chips.
The technology also has the benefits of requiring less space and running much more coolly than equivalent machines. Maxwell only takes up two computer racks at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center.
...
Maxwell has already been tested with high-demand applications from the oil, financial and medical-imaging industries. With the financial application, Parsons said, Maxwell ran at between two and 300 times faster than an equivalent system using standard processors.

I want one.
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[scribble]

No, it's not for real. FPGAs require vastly more power than your standard single-purpose CPU.

Secondly, it's not new. FPGA-based processors have been around since the early 80's and can be ordered today from many different manufacturers.

These guys make a pretty popular one:

http://www.xilinx.com/

 

[Soapy Sam]

No, it's not for real. FPGAs require vastly more power than your standard single-purpose CPU.

Secondly, it's not new. FPGA-based processors have been around since the early 80's and can be ordered today from many different manufacturers.

These guys make a pretty popular one:

http://www.xilinx.com/

...and they have a large office in Edinburgh. Coincidence?

 

[marting]

No, it's not for real. FPGAs require vastly more power than your standard single-purpose CPU.

This is only true when the FPGA is configured to emulate a specific CPU. When configured as a special purpose processor, such as decoding and error correcting a communications channel, it is far more efficient than a CPU programmed to accomplish the same task. It also has the capability to be "programmed" or configured for various parallel processing tasks more efficiently than a CPU.

Secondly, it's not new. FPGA-based processors have been around since the early 80's and can be ordered today from many different manufacturers.

Indeed, not only have FPGAs been around a long time, bur reconfigurable array processing apps have been as well. I remember a penny stock company that hyped such circuit board having about 50 Xilinx FPGA's with all sorts of allusions to star wars, of all things.