It is a really great device. The two most common exceptions are price and language support.
In many designs, the chip can replace several.
Early on, yes. Was SPIN and PASM (assembly language, but no where as hard as one would imagine) Today, C, and other languages are well supported.
It is a true multi-processor. The developer can choose freely between concurrency and parallelism as needed. Combining code objects is crazy easy too.
Concurrent can be something like a video display on one core, or COG as they are known, keyboard, SD card, mouse on another. Once done, those two cores would appear much like hardware to a program running on another one.
Parallel could be several cores all computing something at the same time. Doing a mandelbrot set is an example of both.
Main program directs the set computation, one core outputs video, the remaining ones work a little like shaders do, all computing pixels.
Interrupts could have made a few niche things a tiny bit better. Mostly they really are not needed.
I had a ton of fun programming and doing some automation with this chip.
It's second gen will tape out, and early revision chips already have. Real chips, back from the fab for a final round of polish and testing.
On those, every single pin has DAC ADC, a smart pin processor and a variety of modes and pullups, pulldowns all configurable in softwares. It is a little like having a mini scope with good triggers on each pin.
Interrupts are present, but no global ones, nor with any ability to interfere with other cores.
This will keep the lego like feature of grabbing drivers and other code, and having it act like built in hardware, while at the same time making for event driven code that is easily shared and or combined with other code.
Interrupts are called events and there are 16 of them, three priority levels, and that is per core, 8 cores total.
People can build crazy complex things able to input signals or data, process with high speed accurate CORDIC, and stream data or signals out.
Freaking playground. I have been running an FPGA dev system for a while now. That is 80 Mhz.
Real chips will clock at 250 Mhz and up through about 350.
They also get used for industrial automation and data collection.