I don't like to rain on anyone's parade, but this is at least the third time I've seen one of these comments, and if it were me I'd want someone to point out a drawback that these young whippersnappers might be too respectful to mention. Isn't it a truism in modern computer architecture that computation is cheap whereas communication is expensive? That "fancy routing hardware" is what mitigates this problem as far as possible by enabling signals to propagate between units in the same clock domain within a single clock period. Your system makes the problem worse by requiring a number of clock periods at best directly proportional to their physical separation, and worse depending on the layout. If I were trying to answer this criticism, I'd start by looking up systolic arrays (another great idea that never went anywhere) and finding out what applications were suited to them if any.