Reminds me a lot of the Parallax Propeller: many simple cores optimized for bit-banging I/O and programmable logic. Of course this is much lower power and has many more cores.

I think that many core architectures can actually be simpler to program in an embedded context than the traditional single core systems. It's akin to a hardware implementation of the actor model rather than an interrupt state machine or interrupt event loop. Being able to dedicate cores to single I/O tasks means you can bitbang almost anything. Here's HDMI running in a few lines of code on a Propeller 2 with no external components but the HDMI connector: https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/comment/1475075/#Comm...