It just seems like a typical startup thinking they have done something totally unique and know more than anyone else.
To have gotten even seed funding, I'm sure they're not that naive. It sure would be interesting to hear exactly why they think they can succeed where others haven't.
I highly doubt this will see any kind of mainstream adoption. Especially if most software wont work with it and would need rewritten.
That's not actually a deal-breaker for embedded applications, depending on whether it truly requires a rewrite or just a recompile.
That Stretch, Inc. company had a C compiler that could use profiling data to automatically determine which hot spots of your program should be synthesized into logic gates, while the rest ran on a general purpose core. So, at least their sales pitch was that it just needed a recompile and not a full rewrite.
The cool thing it could do is reconfigure itself about 100 times per second (which is orders of magnitude faster than you could reconfigure a typical FPGA). So, different parts of your program could use different configurations of the logic array. This was an actual shipping product they sold that could do video compression, among other things. And yet, market uptake was relatively low, with most sales going to people treating it as effectively a black box video compression ASIC.
Another major issue is vendor lock in. If you invest time in developing your program to work with their architecture then you are completely at the mercy of a startup, which isn't a good position to be in. Your code will not work on any other processor.
The vendor lock-in thing is mainly an issue just because they're a startup that might go out of business before they can make enough chips to use in your product. Otherwise, it's really just a question of how much you need to customize your code for it. In the embedded world, firmware is typically customized to a given chip, to some degree.
It's very interesting that they compare it's efficiency to microcontrollers rather than desktop CPUs and that they talk about embedded a lot. In the embedded industry a chip that can be reconfigured for loads of different tasks really isn't that useful and is often expensive. ... you don't typically go and use a large general purpose chip that could do everything,
Well... you're sort of overlooking FPGAs. So, maybe they've got something that can take on FPGAs in one or more respects. Or, maybe they've got something like Stretch had, where the reconfiguration happens while the program is running so you can get more mileage out of a limited logic budget.
They seem to market the concept to general computing but then change and talk about microcontrollers and embedded development.
If it can let you do big things on a microcontroller-scale power budget and for similar cost, then it's an apt comparison.
If they were being honest and actually know what they are doing then they wouldn't have just compared it to a microcontroller without giving at least details of which MCU they are comparing it to.
There's a reason they're not giving us these details, and it's not because they're so incompetent. They're announcing themselves because they want to raise money. If you were a potential investor, you'd get to see their full pitch deck, which would include all of the sorts of details we're talking about.
However, what they've announced to the general public is just enough to attract the interest of investors, but not enough to tip off potential competitors. Once they have an actual product they're trying to sell, that's when we'll get all the juicy details. Right now, it's just too early.
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