Managing Complexities in the age of multi-ARM cores and multi-DSP cores?

Hello, I would like to get some comments of my questions about managing complexities and costs in this age of multi-core ARM and multi-cores DSPs. I have co-workers that have spent months working on the software for one of today's post powerful multi-core ARM+DSP processors. They tell me of the problems they have in getting things working and also the lack of documentation and the frustration they have when the processor vendor uses third party tools to configure the device because there are thousands of registers that need to be configured. So, we can get everything done on one chip but at an extremely high cost and the possibility that only a few engineers can keep the device running. I've almost jumped on board and started selecting one of these devices but stopped short at the increased life-cycle+support costs that I would pass onto the customer. My conclusion is to keep things manageable by using more two or more devices and link them together using their built-in high speed links.


Has anyone else came across this or thought about the increased cost of using these kind of devices?


Thanks,

Joe