The big server farmers (Google, facebook, twitter, ..) happy with their versions of Map-Reduce, probably prioritize power bill reductions. I don’t mean they wouldn’t want cheaper hardware, but then it really needs to be cheaper, while still being “commodity” for the software they need to run.

On the consumer devices side, at the risk of being proven utterly un-imaginative, the question that begs to be asked is – why would anyone need 48 cores? That brings us back to the classic problem of parallel computing – Is it (still) worth it?

Tilera does seem to have ambitions in the broader network application market, but these ambitions are probably doomed from the get-go. The advantage of a commodity architecture is the easy spring-board for development. Few cloud service providers will stop to rearchitect their application for maximum throughput after it hits big; rather, they’ll look for more effective ways to scale their existing architecture. If Tilera really does want to play here, it should offer a low-cost developer kit to enable startups to target applications to their processor. Otherwise, they’re depending on businesses to make the leap to depending on their platform without having had the opportunity to discover the advantages in a low-risk environment.