IMO this combines some of the worse features of Cell (e.g. local memory and DMA) and GPUs, and while the power efficiency is good the absolute performance is very low. For a parallel noob who's using OpenMP/OpenCL I don't think it's any better than a desktop PC because programming it is going to feel the same and performance is going to be equal or lower. And if you don't use the libraries then you're in low-level ninjas-only land — the extremely simple and flexible hardware is good in theory because you can use it many different ways, but it also doesn't help you or give any hints about how to properly exploit it.
It's not meant to compete with a desktop PC, or with a mass produced GPU.
It's meant to be a development platform for solutions based on their architecture and for people to get familiar with the development model, with an existing 64-core version of their chip and future versions intended to put 1000+ cores on a board as the eventual target.
That it's also a reasonably capable platform to run Linux on (on the ARM chip) so you can do development directly on the board is an added bonus.
If the architecture is not good then people don't want to get familiar with it. I'm skeptical that even an "eventual" version with hundreds of cores would be worth using.
Well, clearly at least 3700 people want to get familiar with it based on the number of backers so far, which is pretty good for a niche platform like this.
