Von Neuman's architecture has run out of steam. The fact that most transistors in a computer at any given moment are idle seems to be a huge waste. What if you could just have a computational fabric that lets you have one instruction per cell, and run whole programs in parallel?

FPGAs do that, but the "smart" routing fabric in them makes compiling code to them take hours or days.

If you eliminate the switching fabric on an FPGA, you are left with a grid of Look Up Tables (LUTS) each connected to their neighbors. The result is a Turing Complete computer that works exclusively in parallel.