Intel said that because of the Intel Stratix 10’s unique design it could work 10 to 100 times faster than the chips in consumer devices. The latest Intel Stratix 10 FPGAs came out in February – are capable of 10 TFLOPS, or 10 trillion floating point operations per second. The Stratix 10 is the fastest chip of its kind in the world.

The Stratix 10 contains about 30 billion transistors more than triple the number of transistors in the chips that run today’s fastest laptops and desktops and can process the data equivalent to 420 Blu-ray Discs in just one second.

Unlike traditional central processing units (CPUs) that power today’s laptops and desktops, FPGAs can be customised – or reprogrammed remotely and on the fly – to perform highly specialised computing tasks so it is not as if Stratix is ever going to have the job of playing Crysis any time soon.