I was an architect on the Anton 2 and 3 machines - the systolic arrays that computed pairwise interactions were a significant component of the chips, but there were also an enormous number of fairly normal looking general-purpose (32-bit / 4-way SIMD) processor cores that we just programmed with C++.
I love stuff like this! I have a Kaypro 2/84, which supports a display resolution of 160x100 with colors ranging from green, to 'less green' to black, and I went down a rabbit hole of trying to push the graphics: https://www.chrisfenton.com/exploring-kaypro-video-performan... - I was eventually able to get it do display (short!) 50 fps video clips.
I built a more whimsical version of this - my daughter and I basically built a 'junk robot' from a 1980s movie, told it 'you're an independent and free junk robot living in a yard', and let it go: https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/
I did this like 18 months ago, so it uses a webcam + multimodal LLM to figure out what it's looking at, it has a motor in its base to let it look back and forth, and it use a python wrapper around another LLM as its 'brain'. It worked pretty well!