It's a very interesting architecture that I've heard about on paper for a while now but never seen on silicon. Have they done anything with it on ASIC/FPGA or is it vaporware for now?

Talking exotic, look at No Instruction Set Computing (NISC) which was at least prototyped and published synthesis/compilers:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080302041756/http://www.ics.uc...

Really interesting stuff. Reminded me of Tensillica's tools that create a custom processor for your application. Need to accelerate your Hadoop, etc application? Run most of it on Intel CPU with an onboard FPGA & NISC tools doing the critical path. Intel's Altera acquisition might make something like that achievable in future.

Note: Used archive because their site is having a configuration error.