Where is the market for this, apart from Facebook (Open Compute Project)? Is it set to compete with CPUs like the Xeon E3-1220L series? Will it end up in HP's Moonshot? I thought that bigger boxes with virtualization would be more economical for most uses than closets full of low-power CPUs.
Perhaps I/O is the key here, N of these A1100 CPUs can easily saturate N x 2 x 10GbE, a single box with 64+ cores probably cannot push 16 x 10GbE.
The developer board runs Fedora. Any workload that does not depend on a specific CPU architecture (mostly everything but Windows) should run on it. The dev board is there to make it possible to developers to fine tune their implementations so they run well on the new platform.
Will server makers buy it? That remains to be seen.
Making a dev board available (let's hope it's also cheap enough to make hobbyists buy it) is rather clever. Without software tuned for it, the chip could fail on the market like Sun's Niagara and Intel's Itanium did.
Perhaps I/O is the key here, N of these A1100 CPUs can easily saturate N x 2 x 10GbE, a single box with 64+ cores probably cannot push 16 x 10GbE.