I hope it materializes, that said, to those who may be knocking the hardware specs, you may want to head over to the PA Semi site and download the whitepaper on this processor, its a beauty, and it will be able to do some things that even high end computers systems do not do. Among my favorites, and this depends on wheter these features are implemented or not are:
Memory controllers are on the CPU die. This feature is available in the AMD chips today, and has been one of the primary reasons why they have been competative in the CPU market. This means low latency access to memory without a north bridge arbriter to get in the way.
The chip has an onboard TCP/IP offload engine. This means that the IP stack is offloaded onto hardware, further freeing the CPU from processing packets at that level.
A multi channel DMA engine to offload memory transfers between memory and devices.
25W of power as a worst case sceneraio!!! can you say silent PC?
RAID in hardware!
Essentially this processor has built in engines to offload an accelerate IO tasks away from from the core CPU thereby freeing those cycles for other tasks. There is a bit of the good old dedicated co processor concepts from the original Amiga in this very special processor. This includes the ability to do some things in one chip which require many other components to do in the PC world.
