This piece of hardware is a vector processor, or an array processor, depending on which term you choose to use.
Vector/array processors have been around for decades, albeit typically in very high-end kit (read: One Per Country sort of stuff). They aren't new technology really, and with enough resources I'd guess they aren't that difficult to design and build.
There is, however, a very good reason we're not all using them today: they're are beneficial only for a very restricted range of problems. For example VPs are great where you have very large arrays and you need to do the same thing to each array element. Scientific simulation, weather predicition, that sort of thing, they're great. When was the last time you tried to predict the weather?
Even for some scientific algorithms (those not typically involving grids, or FFTs, or whatever), getting one of these things to provide a decent return can be a real challenge.
