The things you list are pretty much some of the base fundamentals of circuit design. I can't imagine that this curriculum is of much use without them.
Also, I seriously doubt that it covers the entire breadth of information required to create, from scratch, the entire video subsystem required for displaying graphics. Or anything like that.
These guys are completely dishonest. I saw their kickstarter video where they said that for $99 you could have "a computer many times faster than anything on the market ZOMG".
Yeah, maybe it's faster for all those times during the day when you calculate matrix chain products. But for largely single-threaded tasks, like EVERYTHING you do on a day to day basis, it's going to be significantly slower than your average dual-core i3.
I backed them on kickstarter, and I don't remember seeing any claim like what you claim to have seen.
To me it was always clear that the current models are not particularly fast. They may be fast "per watt", and if they succeed in their roadmap, then their future 1024 core chips may be fast for the subset of problems that they are suitable for.
In the meantime, the kickstarter page is/was careful to focus on this as a stepping stone, and developer platform for playing with the technology first and foremost, and not as being about delivering some incredibly fast computer for end users.
If anything, they've provided an extreme amount of data, down to cycle counts for memory accesses and the instruction set, and they've dumped a lot of code in our laps, including drivers etc., and the final unit actually comes with a faster version of the Zynq SoC than what they promised, after Xilinx apparently gave them an amazing deal.
The fact that they are childless indicates that they don't have time to have children, but how the hell is the fact that they're white relevant to the point they're trying to make in the article?
