Startup company Flow Computing claims its companion chip can instantly 2x any CPU performance

A Finnish startup called Flow Computing is making a wild claim with its newly developed proprietary chip. The companion chip is said to offer an instant 2x performance boost on any CPU (fast AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D curr. $339.99 on Amazon). What's more interesting is that it is said to deliver up to a 100x jump with software tweaks.

As per the company, the technology is the result of the research performed at VTT, which is a Finland state-backed research organization. Branded as the Parallel Processing Unit (PPU), it claims to eliminate the primary limitation of processors, which is that each of the cores can do only one task at a time.

Of course, the multi-core processors switch that one task a billion times across different cores and pathways. But it's still based on the single-lane fundamentals. The companion chip from Flow Computing performs on-die traffic management to move tasks into and out of the processor. It does that on a nanosecond scale, making the processor work with tasks faster than previously possible.

The interesting bit is that Flow didn't need to modify any CPU architecture or code to achieve this high-speed traffic management. But for the companion chip to work, it needs to be included at the chip-design level, which means it's not retroactive. However, the company says a further jump in performance is possible by refactoring and recompiling software, which is said to be capable of offering up to 100x boost.

While we have all these claims, the first chip with a PPU is still way down the road, and chipmakers need to invest quite a lot of resources to see the gains. But Flow did show that the CPU-PPU combo tech works in FPGA-based test setups.