"parallelizing a cellular automaton is trivial" != "build my own, special-purpose hardware"
You can parallelize a cellular automaton trivially with any form of parallel computation, from multiple cores, to a GPU, to an FGPA. Hence my skepticism that their application is particularly revolutionary or brain-relevant, as the article seems to imply.
As for FPGAs you can get them fairly cheaply if you aren't looking for a top of the line beast. [1] Given that you can emulate anything up to and including a Pentium on a sufficiently powerful FPGA, I fail to see how you are "limited by the manufacturers design choices" or why you can't "apply a wide range of computational topologies" on one.
In any event, the breathless tone of the article about "brain-like" computing and this somehow being a parallelism silver bullet are unwarranted.
You can parallelize a cellular automaton trivially with any form of parallel computation, from multiple cores, to a GPU, to an FGPA. Hence my skepticism that their application is particularly revolutionary or brain-relevant, as the article seems to imply.
As for FPGAs you can get them fairly cheaply if you aren't looking for a top of the line beast. [1] Given that you can emulate anything up to and including a Pentium on a sufficiently powerful FPGA, I fail to see how you are "limited by the manufacturers design choices" or why you can't "apply a wide range of computational topologies" on one.
In any event, the breathless tone of the article about "brain-like" computing and this somehow being a parallelism silver bullet are unwarranted.