Here's a description of the "Automata Processor", a phrase I hadn't heard before [1]:

> Micron’s new Automata Processor (AP) architecture exploits the very high and natural level of parallelism found in DRAM technologies to achieve native-hardware implementation of nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs). The use of DRAM technology to implement the NFA states provides high capacity and therefore provide extraordinary parallelism for pattern recognition. In this paper, we give an overview of AP's architecture, programming and applications.

[1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~skadron/Papers/wang_APoverview_...