A novel way for USA.

[nelg]

OK it may require some crystal balling here, but it is cool nonetheless ..........

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16989&ch=biztech

The novel chips work by exploiting inherent "chaotic" behavior within the integrated circuits, enabling a single, simple circuit to behave like any kind of logic gate. Such a chip could be transformed, for example, from a graphics card into a memory chip and back again -- in just two computer clock cycles. "We have blurred the line between software and hardware," says William Ditto, chief technology officer of ChaoLogix, which was spun out of research at the University of Florida.

 

[KimB]

That's a rather interesting idea, but I'm curious as to how temperature-sensitive the technique would be. And the logic density would still be much lower for such a setup than with your normal integrated circuit designs, just as it is with FPGA's.

Computing using programmable elements is nothing new, though. Starbridge Systems has been at it for a little while now:
http://www.starbridgesystems.com/

They make use of FPGA's in conjunction with Intel Xeon processors to, they say, produce high-performance, low-power supercomputers. The x86 processors are basically there to run control software that reconfigures and sends requests to the FPGA's, which do the meat of the processing.