Frank Vahid, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at University of California Riverside, has developed a new technology he calls “Warp processing” that gives a computer chip the ability to improve its performance over time.

Here’s how Warp processing works: When a program first runs on a microprocessor chip (such as a Pentium), the chip monitors the program to detect its most frequently-executed parts. The microprocessor then automatically tries to move those parts to a special kind of chip called a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA. “An FPGA can execute some (but not all) programs much faster than a microprocessor – 10 times, 100 times, even 1,000 times faster,” explains Vahid. 

The technology is most applicable to anything that is compute-intensive and operates on large streams of data.