A number of you may remember I presented our plans for the open source lowRISC SoC at OSHUG 36 in October http://oshug.org/event/36
You may be interested that we've released a document that describes in more detail two of the ideas I presented at the meeting - tagged memory and 'minion' cores (for software-defined I/O peripherals and other uses).
Comments, feedback, queries etc are all very welcome.
http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-minion-cores/
Alex