Nowadays, the trend of developing micro-processor with hundreds of cores brings a promising prospect for embedded systems. Realizing a high performance and low power many-core processor is becoming a primary technical challenge. Generally, three major issues required to be resolved includes: 1) realizing efficient massively parallel processing, 2) reducing dynamic power consumption, and 3) improving software productivity. To deal with these issues, we propose a solution to use many low-performance but small and very low-power cores to obtain very high performance, and develop a referential many-core architecture and a program development environment. This paper introduces a many-core architecture named SMYLEref and its prototype system with off-the-shelf FPGA evaluation boards. The initial evaluation results of several SPLASH2 benchmark programs conducted on our developed 128-core platform are also presented and discussed in this paper.