Ugh, "computers". I'm not even a stickler for terminology, but the whole "144 computers" thing somehow rubs me the wrong way, like it's some Best Buy salesdroid telling me that a quad-core means having four computers in one box.
So it's not like a computer with 144 1-core CPU:s sharing RAM and ports, or a CPU with 144 cores, it's something weirder and more reminiscent of a network of small computers.
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.)
I've never implemented a gaussian blur on bitmaps with a FPGA, maybe it is simpler somehow than this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwM0qfQqmdE
They honestly do sound quite interesting, and if I could fork myself off a few times to look at fun & interesting things, this GreenArray stuff would be in the list ;)