Thoughts on J-core?

For those unfamiliar, the J-Core is a free implementation of the SuperH CPU of which was used in the Sega Saturn, Dreamcast and some old RISC servers and their mindset is instead of paying for licensing from ARM to make a CPU, they just collectively dump resources into an architecture who's patents are expired and work from there and see if they can add more features that the original SuperH ASICS could dream of and they say they're working on a 64-bit implementation, (in about 4 years) but it will be a backwards compatible to SH32 unlike the official implementation that went the Itanium rout. We will be approaching the Dreamcast's 20th anniversary in a couple years (meaning they have a reference device that says "hey, the patents are expired") and before I got into free software, the gaming performance on the Dreamcast at 200mhz killed a Pentium 4 at 1ghz. (and I suppose you could still run some free homebrew on it today because the Mill-CD function was used as an unlocked bootloader)

But, yeah, that machine was fast for it's day and I'm curious what a more contemporary implementation can do like if it was workstation class, had more clock cycles and IPC. As for the practicality, well, there are ASICs that will be made soon and for now, they're targeting the embedded market because of the patent situation and when you get ASICs made, you either pay an arm and a leg for the new hotness of 14nm or you could use an older manufacturing process like 140nm and get them made for like $0.04 per chip.

So, I think they have a very pragmatic approach of starting small to get their foot in the door and work their way from there.What do you guys think?

http://j-core.org/roadmap.html