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.
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.