The company is also working to design another generation of its traditional systems - known as vector processors.

A specialized vector processor can line up hundreds of thousands of calculations and then race through them.

In a vector processor, by contrast, a single instruction operates simultaneously on multiple data items.

The new systems use software to solve problems that once required the processing power of traditional supercomputers, which are known as vector processors.

In the 1960s pipelining was viewed as an innovation, and by the 1970s the use of vector processors had been well established.

By the 1980s, many supercomputers used parallel vector processors.

It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications.

But to a vector processor, this task looks considerably different:

But more than that, a vector processor may have multiple functional units adding those numbers in parallel.

In fact, vector processors work best only when there are large amounts of data to be worked on.