Your Wikipedia link to "stream processors" is for the wrong kind of stream processors. For a decades, the digital signal processing and graphics worlds have use

Your Wikipedia link to "stream processors" is for the wrong kind of stream processors. For a decades, the digital signal processing and graphics worlds have used the streaming abstraction to design programs and hardware. Their applications are typically expressed in pipelines, and do have to continually process data. "Big data" stream processing is obviously related as its a dataflow programming model, but it's still very different in practice. The streaming abstraction is generally more free-form, and not realized directly in hardware. I contrast the two kinds of streaming in Section 2 of a paper from a few years ago: http://www.scott-a-s.com/files/pact2012.pdf http://www.scott-a-s.com/files/pact2012.pdf