[dboreham]

> Is this idea the progenitor of SoCs

No and yes. The idea of a SoC is pretty generic and existed in the industry at the time. But the Inmos team had an interesting mix of system and chip designers (some people who designed both) which led to an elevated interest in trying to get more functionality on-chip. E.g. the PLL clock generator, memory controller, on-board serial I/O. The idea that you could sell a custom chip with CPU and some application-specific peripherals onboard also existed. Inmos developed a disk controller transputer (M212) to showcase that concept.