[white-flame]

I wouldn't expect the assembly language level to be too far off from the common paradigms. Where I'd expect the software challenges to be would be in managing large amounts of memory, if the application programmer must manage shuffling data between the local scratchpad, specific locations in foreign scratchpads that must be (manually?) DMA'd around, and DRAMs.

[trsohmers]

Our whole goal, as talked about in the software section of our website (and the ACM paper linked in it), is to have the scratchpads be entirely automated by our toolchain. While we want to allow for especially adventurous programmers to have full freedom with the scratchpads, existing and future programs written in C/C++/other languages supported in the future will handle memory allocation identically (from the programmers perspective) as existing architectures.

One other thing to point out is that our actually addressing of a cores local scratchpad, as well as "foreign" scratchpads of other cores on the same chip and/or any other attached chip is handled exactly the same. All memory operations are handled through the exact same load/store instructions as part of a global flat address map that is the same for all cores in a system (one or multiple chips interconnected).