[w34]

Yes!

There are quite a few changes we made on the architectural and microarchitectural level. Our dissertation and the presentation slides do mention this but I'll give you the gist of it:

We replaced the existing serial communication links with a single link that connects to a network of switches that are arranged in a Benes fashion. This allows for a very scalable way of building networks and is actually used in telecommunications systems. Our supervisor, Professor David May actually gave us the idea. Seemed pretty smart to me compared to other ways of building large networks.

We also introduced a new way of interfacing with peripherals (I/O), sensors and other things that might be useful to have if you're developing a piece of IoT hardware. And as I said we use the same message passing mechanism to interface with them that we also use for communication.

We also made lots of changes on the microarchitectural side: We went away from a microcoded design and became more akin to RISC by using hard wired logic.