[myrmidon]

Yes, if you want all the drawbacks of distributed computing with none of the advantages: You'd probably be stuck with something UART based as interconnect, Every core is gonna have way too little RAM to do anything useful, you are missing like half the instruction set (floating point operations in software), and power draw at 4mW minimum per core adds up quickly to something that an efficient laptop-CPU would use.

On top of all this, latency for anything is gonna be abysmal because the cores are so slow...

I honestly don't see an application where this is even close to desirable.

Would be fun, tough, to have a 10-stack of PCBs with 10 by 10 CPUs each for a thousand cores (=> ~4W power @1.8V).

[imtringued]

Using it as a cluster is probably a bad idea, but you could probably build a 2d sensor grid using these. The 8 pin restriction is extremely limiting though. If you have an FSR matrix, you could connect a 2x2 grid to each MCU and then connect each row in a daisy chain configuration.

[aa-jv]

Maybe not practical as a cluster configuration, but it could certainly be used as a voice-generating device for a synthesizer, or as a controlling device for MIDI I/O, or .. both even of course, configurable according to the users needs/patch idea.

[myrmidon]

Yeah, but even for those applications you suffer from limited RAM a lot; with 16bit samples at 48kHz the thing has 10ms of audio buffer (stereo: 5ms) if you don't need RAM for anything else :S

The ADC is really nice though, 1.5 MSPS is really good for such a small/low powered thing (fills the whole RAM in under half a millisecond).

[piva00]

10ms of buffer is almost 512 samples @ 48kHz, it's quite a lot of buffer in audio terms!

[emctech]

I have a fourier transform loop running on this micro which takes 64 samples and outputs 32 frequency bins. It works perfectly for generating inputs to algorithmically driven animations including a visual audio spectrum frequency analyser.

[aa-jv]

True, you will have to write some tight code, but .. at that form factor and price, challenge accepted! Besides, 10ms is a LOT in that world ..