It's another iteration of the unit record machine [0] - batch processes done with a physical arrangement of the steps in the process. CPU design moved away fro

It's another iteration of the unit record machine [0] - batch processes done with a physical arrangement of the steps in the process. CPU design moved away from this analogy a long while ago because the tasks being done with CPUs involved more dynamic control flow structures and arbitrary workloads. But workloads that are linear batches of brute force math don't need that kind of dynamism, so gridded designs become fashionable as a way of expressing a configurable pipeline with clear semantics - everything on the grid is at a linear, integer-scalable distance, buffers will be of the same size, etc. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment