Not a new concept
The (then) Motorola SPS (semiconductor product sector) had their CSIC (customer specified integrated circuit) line of parts which were made from multiple die in the early 1990s.
I was working with the really old 68HC05 series and when I went to download the assembler and linker, a questionnaire was presented to define the perfect microcontroller (type of core, peripheral set) and they took that information to fabricate what most of the customers apparently wanted. The programme worked - 68HC05/08/12/16 parts are still available today and were really popular in automotive for ECUs.
The interconnect was not particularly fast (well, it was reasonable for the time) but interconnect has been the driver in the HPC space for many years. An on-chip interconnect is always going to have speed and signal integrity advantages over a second level (PCB) interconnect.
There have been other products that took this approach (such as Tilera) but they really never hit the mainstream (mostly used in comms now).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
