This is the research paper referred to by the newatlas article:
I'll start with an editorial comment: I despise papers written in this style. It is difficult to read, incredibly dense, and requires a high level of expertise to be able to judge the efficacy of the concepts, which means this paper isn't easy to use as a learning aid. I suppose the internet and search engines make it possible to get substantial value from a paper like this, but it is tiresome. The paper has 111 cited references. Seriously? Also, there are several grammatical errors in the paper, which leads one to wonder how carefully it was peer-reviewed. End of rant.
That said, heterogeneous computing has been an active area for research and implementation for a long time. Two examples are OpenCL and SYCL. All of these approaches use the so-called "magic compiler" strategy, to produce code objects which produce (supposedly) equivalent computational results with different instruction set architectures in the underlying hardware, and that includes RTL for FPGA execution. This paper does not include consideration of FPGAs, and only considers processors which have formal instruction sets, though one could define instruction execution macros in FPGAs which would have similar functionality, and I suppose could be accommodated in the magic compiler.
The difference between the previous strategies, such as the SYCL/OpenCL approaches, and the paper's version of SHMT, is that the paper describes an instruction processing strategy which is reminiscent of the internals of many modern CPUs, where instructions are decoded in parallel into micro-operations (micro-ops), which are then scheduled and executed by multiple microcode engines in parallel pipelines, and the results are assembled into the CPU's external instructions. I like the innovation, but it appears to me that the SHMT run-time layer has to own all of the hardware in the system to make this strategy function. If that is correct, it would mean the applications are limited to dedicated machines, such as subsystems within a larger system configuration. (This was a popular strategy for enterprise database appliances many years ago.)
There is significant innovative thinking in this paper, but my impression is that SHMT won't be a high-impact technology for many years. SYCL, a simpler approach I think, has been under development for about 10 years, has had significant support from Intel, but hasn't really changed the world much yet.