Typical multicore CPUs don't have nearly as many cores as Parallella. Also, from what I can from www.apteva.com/introduction, the power consumption is much lowe

Typical multicore CPUs don't have nearly as many cores as Parallella. Also, from what I can from www.apteva.com/introduction, the power consumption is much lower and the interconnect is different. In Parallella, cores are laid out in a grid and cores can only talk directly to their neighbors.