Comment by jecel

It has the functionality of the first Connection Machine, except with no network to exchange values between columns (as another comment pointed out). You can do 64K logic operations, each on one bit, at a time. You still need an external controller (which can be in the FPGA, as you suggested) to fetch instructions, do loops and things like that.

The CM-1 could do conditional execution: you tell the 64k processors to add but only those with a give flag set to 1 will actually do it while the others will execute a NOP. It is possible to simulate this on this design but it would be rather awkward, just like their 1 bit addition is awkward compared to the one clock equivalent in the CM-1.