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This type of processor implements nondeterministic finite state machines². Effectively it allows you to perform regular expression matching, very fast and on large data sets. They implemented this in a very clever way exploiting the fact that DRAM access is extremely parallel by nature. It is useful to solve data mining problems, such as those arising in bioinformatics.

It is quite likely that there are also certain government agencies among the early customers...

²http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_finite_automat...

Fascinating. Can we add a stack?
I believe you are thinking of a different computing paradigm.
I am thinking about what it takes to turn a NFA into a push-down automata.
Btw, a pretty cool thing about their implementation is that they use a standard DDR3 interface which allows the realization of these machines in a standard DIMM form factor. This means that they could be added to almost any existing server.
I wonder if this would be good for features in computer vision too.