Re: Missed point.
There is no "parallel computing". Like cancer, there are many varieties, and they're all different.
GPU programming is kind of a solved problem, and has been for a while. To a first and second approximation, It's just very wide SIMD. The kinds of things you can do well on GPUs have been done well on GPUs already.
This is a MIMD unit for learning MIMD programming, which is very different in approach and in what can be efficiently programmed (available local store is very much increased, for instance). The things you can do well on MIMD + fast interconnect are pretty much unknown so far, except in theory.
I mean, sure, hobbyists can learn last decade's techniques, but it would be much more fun to learn next decade's. And it's not like a hobbyist doesn't already have a GPU he can play with anyway. But he probably gave up on that because shoe-horning stuff onto GPUs that doesn't fit is kind of tedious.
The only problem I can see with this particular MIMD chip is it's not even competitive with a modern CPU, so why bother?