I know someone building a dual core RISC-V SoC that is along similar lines. He has a prototype working in an FPGA and planning to get actual silicon fabbed once he gets it to a satisfactory state. The idea is to be a simple no-frills SoC with enough hardware to run a desktop class OS, have a booting and hardware discovery standard, and well documented to make OS porting simple. He does a lot of low level systems work, network hardware, and security expert. I'll have to poke him at some point to see if he's still working on it.