[General Rant, not particularly directed at Jez]

But surely that was the whole point of the Triscend devices - as it still says on what remnains of their website:

"Triscend Corporation is the pioneer of field Configurable System-on-Chip (CSoC) devices ... that speed the development of highly-customized embedded systems applications ... Triscend's CSoC technology unites — on a single semiconductor device — all the fundamental building blocks necessary for instantly creating a customizable platform..."

Triscend was born out of Xilinx, and now Xilinx has killed this "pioneer" dead! :-(

I'd have thought that Triscend would have provided an ideal "on-ramp" to Xilinx's full FPGA devices & softcores: The idea of using an 8051 microcontroller chip together with an FPGA/CPLD chip is often suggested here - The Triscend combined the two into a single device, with easy "drag-and-drop" FPGA design software. Thus companies could easily make the first step towards FPGA without being thrown into the deep end of VHDL and processor IP cores.

Maybe Xilinx had hoped to get Triscend's ARM licence, but ARM stopped that - having had their original bid scuppered by Xilinx. Maybe then Xilinx didn't think it was work carrying on with just the 8051-based E5?