"this board should deliver about 90 GFLOPS of performance, or --in terms PC users understand-- about the same horse-power as a 45GHz CPU." This is wrong. A 4-

"this board should deliver about 90 GFLOPS of performance, or --in terms PC users understand-- about the same horse-power as a 45GHz CPU." This is wrong. A 4-core 3.0 GHz x86-64 processor delivers more GFLOPS than the Parallela: 96 GFLOPS with SSE instructions, because each core can execute 8 single precision instructions, 4 adds and 4 muls, each cycle. And yes, when Parallela claims 90 GFLOPS, they mean single-precision. For example, for the same price as Parallela, you can get a $100 Phenom II X4 965 (4-core, 3.4 GHz, 125W) delivering 109 GFLOPS. Count $200 to include minimal mobo/RAM/PSU (if all you care about is raw GFLOPS). The main advantage that Parallela has with their exotic architecture over x86-64 is a better GFLOPS/Watt metric. But if you care about this metric you should consider GPUs, which beat Parallela: http://parallelis.com/parallela-supercomputing-for-all-of-us/ http://parallelis.com/parallela-supercomputing-for-all-of-us... Parallela may not beat anything on GFLOPS/Watt and GFLOPS/$, but if they can maintain ease of development (x86-64's stronghold) while doing not too bad on these 2 metrics (dominated by GPUs), they may be a good compromise and may have a shot at succeeding in the HPC market.