How about a DRAM interface? That is both necessary for sufficiently complex applications, and damned hard. An FPGA can do it, for some frequency (though many FPGAs come with a hard DRAM interface to save area and improve the frequency.) This thing? I rather doubt.

Also, "implement an SRAM interface" - perhaps, but not one particularly easy to program against, I believe.

I don't think it's a particularly good fit if what one really wants is the equivalent of a "PC" (ie: n cores of ~broadwell cpu with x gigs of ram) -- I tried to highlight that it is an entirely different system, and one which allows for some interesting streaming, straight forward, approaches to solving many problems. You won't be running python on this thing, but that doesn't mean that you can't do some interesting signal processing -- at extremely low power.

Maybe "really, really smart dsp" is a way to look at it...

Interesting signal processing - perhaps.

I mentioned DRAM because

* An FPGA could do it and the GA chips probably can't,

* You can't do a whole lot of embedded DSP apps without DRAM - it's not a question of "trying to be a PC", you just need memory to store stuff :-) and SRAM is too expensive.

Without DRAM, you're pretty much limited to what you call "streaming"; a whole lot of things don't work without being able to keep a working set in RAM. I don't argue that the chip is useless, just that it's useless in a huge range of use cases including many embedded ones, which is a sharp contrast to the connotations of its self-description as a "multi-computer chip"... And BTW even a really really dumb DSP chip can usually do DRAM :-)

I look at it as "an array of incredibly weak and energy-efficient cores" :-)