Given the small amounts of compute and memory you get on each node (it’s certainly no Adapteva Epiphany or even Cell), it seems to me like it’s more of a replac

Given the small amounts of compute and memory you get on each node (it’s certainly no Adapteva Epiphany or even Cell), it seems to me like it’s more of a replacement for a (low-speed) FPGA than a CPU or even a micro. And that’s not a bad pitch! Modern silicon certainly doesn’t like to be bent into a (single-layer) FPGA shape—the result is comparatively slow, expensive, and power-hungry—but accomodates specialized functional blocks very well, so a matrix of baby processors with accompanying memory sounds genuinely like a good idea for an FPGA-like application. Unfortunately, the GA144 is the only game in town here, and at $500 per dev kit they sure aren’t interested in hobbyists. So I’m left to admire it from a distance. (And $20 per chip is not a bad price considering the competition—as I said, FPGAs are expensive—but it still falls into the expensive-chip bucket. Not a lot of places are going to build a design around a unique expensive chip from an obscure source.)