I have just downloaded the latest arrayForth and polyForth systems for the GreenArrays GA144 EV001 evaluation board, dusted down the eval board and installed it...

Back in ~1978 I accidentally came across microForth for the COSMAC computer, with a 2 MHz CDP1802 and 12K of RAM, and typed  1 1 + .  for the first time.
Since then I have used various flavours of Forth, and I use this simple test to confirm that I can interact with the computer.

So nothing new here, I still get the answer 2, and Greg's saneForth Terminal looks very DOS-like (except that it actually runs under Win7 64 bit).

But this is actually something very different :
1. There is no assembler because this is running in a few of the F18 cores in one of the GA144 chips which have a Forth instruction set.
2. There is no cross compiler because the GA144 polyForth compiles itself on the chip - the PC is only a terminal.
3. There is no "inner interpreter" AKA "address interpreter" because the F18 cores are programmed to be the polyForth virtual machine. OK, you can argue semantics here...
4. Contradicting point 1, there is a sort of assembler, in that you can define extensions to the virtual machine, and also access any of the other 100+ F18's via Ganglia and Snorkels ( whatever they are - more docs please GA guys :-)

I also ran a speed test :
: asd  1000 for 1000 for 0 drop next next ;
takes about 3 seconds.
IIRC a 16 MHx Novix takes less than 1 second for this, and most 8 bit processors are some tens of seconds.

Speed wise, the combination of GA144, SPI EEPROM and SRAM, running polyForth looks plenty fast enough for the sort of embedded apps I usually work with.
Power wise, it looks good too.
Cost wise, well maybe I can haggle with GA...
Peripherals - there are plenty of fast counters, F18's in adundance that can be programmed to do simple serial or even 10M Ethernet, or you can use the built in SERDES.

All in all it could compete with an MSP430, 8051 or a PIC except that only with the GA144 do you get so many fast cores with fast I/O to play with.

The GA144 with polyForth seems to be to good not to use...

Just sharing my excitement - well done to all the GreenArray folks!