Sounds similar to the GA144 chip from the inventor of Forth
The BitGrid is bit oriented, not bytes or words, which makes if flexible for doing FP8, FP16, or whatever other type of calculation is required. Since everything is clocked at the same rate/step, data flows continuously, without need for queue/dequeue, etc.
Ideally, a chip could be made that's a billion cells. The structure is simple, and uniform. An emulator exists, and that would return the exact same answer (albeit much slower) than a billion cell chip. You could divide up simulation among a network of CPUs to speed it up.