XMOS Programmable Multicore Chip

Last year around this time, I wrote an article about a new chip from XMOS Semiconductor that promised to provide a multicore processor chip with highly configurable IO so that it could perform in many hardware applications.  They had announced products, but nothing was available yet at that time.  Now XMOS has available a development kit for $999 that basically takes the form of a little hand held electronic device with an LCD screen.  The XS1-G4 device is currently available for samples.  It has 4 configurable processor cores and up to 256 IO pins.  It is not clear if they have IO interfaces developed yet in libaries to be used in customers' applications.  It seems like there could be quite a lot of effort to develop low level hardware interfaces for the device (ie SDRAM controller, ethernet MAC, I2C controller, ect.), but that once those are developed they could be easily reused from one project to another.  There is a user community dedicated to the part called Xlinkers.  There will be 1 core and 2 core versions of this chip out next year.

The promise of the device is that it allows flexible reprogrammability like FPGAs, but is much cheaper than FPGAs because the processors are implemented directly in silicon instead of programmable logic which takes up more die space.  The configurable IO are flexible enough to allow the processors to connect directly to many interfaces without intermediate glue logic, unlike typical microprocessors.