Worth noting that the GreenArrays chip is 15 years old. 144 cores was a BIG DEAL back then. I wonder what a similar architecture compiled with a modern process could achieve. 1440 cores? More?
those weren't "real" cores. you know what current chip has FUs that it falsely calls "cores"? that's right, Nvidia GPUs. I think that's the answer to your question (pushing 20k).
In what way were they not “real” cores? They had their own operating environment completely independent of other cores. GPU execution units on the other hand are SIMD--a single instruction stream.
How are GA144's nodes / "computers" not real cores? They're fully independent, each has its own memory (RAM and ROM), stacks, and registers, its own I/O ports and GPIO pins (some of them), and so on.
