I can see from the photos that it's using this board: http://zedboard.org/product/zedboard

I'm surprised BBC is not only willing to make custom hardware, but custom RTL design as well.

I'm curious what the failure rate of the FPGA will be, I mean they are more susceptible to soft errors than CPUs or ASICs. Maybe BBC will fund making a custom ASIC :-) Well I see two systems, maybe they are redundant that way.

Why not make the project open source? Put it up on github.