Or part of a chip. The SSE units in Intel and the 3DNow! units in AMD are the same kind of thing, only a little more general purpose, and thus slower, than a GPU. The Cell processor in a Playstation 3 has seven such units (actually 8, but one deactivated to increase yield) in addition to a generic PowerPC CPU core. IBM is building the world's first petaflop supercomputer using Cell chips.
Seymour cray used to say what would you want to plow a field, 2 strong oxen or 1,024 chickens. The problem with that is we can make a 16-legged chicken these days that's stronger than both of his oxen.
Hey Shadow,
With my above post this has me thinking about yields. IBM is now seriously using the Cell for such applications. Wouldn’t it be a good idea for them to send all 8-core tested Cell processors to such use and then use all 7-core tested ones for the PS3? Right now they’re just deactivating the extra core even if it tests out to make all PS3 Cells the same. Or maybe they’re already doing this...