content: I wouldn't be surprised if they were fairly decent processors, 16-bit or better.  You can fit billions of transistors on a modern chip, when you can make a darn good processor with a million or so.  The limiting factor is communications, and that's been a problem forever.  There are a few specialized problems for which this sort of arrangement can be effective, where either the data for a problem can be duplicated or where the data are fairly small but require a bunch of cycles to process.