I can't imagine that the 96 core cluster would be either power efficient or cost efficient compared to Intel offerings. Assuming 3 watts and $100 per core (which align fairly well to the figures presented in the article), 96 core cluster would draw nearly 300 watts and cost nearly $10000.
Contrast that to eg Intel E5-2650L[1]: 8 cores, 16 threads, 70 watts and $1200 price. Obviously the whole system cost would be much higher, but I find it hard to believe that you couldn't get/build two 2-socket systems with such CPU for $10000. The CPUs alone would draw 280 watts, which would put the whole system power consumption in the same ballpark as the ARM cluster.
Remaining question would be performance. ARM cluster would have 50% more (logical) cores, but I'd imagine that Intel would have far higher per-thread performance. And for lots of tasks the 100M Ethernet of the Beagleboard as an interconnect could become a bottleneck.
Contrast that to eg Intel E5-2650L[1]: 8 cores, 16 threads, 70 watts and $1200 price. Obviously the whole system cost would be much higher, but I find it hard to believe that you couldn't get/build two 2-socket systems with such CPU for $10000. The CPUs alone would draw 280 watts, which would put the whole system power consumption in the same ballpark as the ARM cluster.
Remaining question would be performance. ARM cluster would have 50% more (logical) cores, but I'd imagine that Intel would have far higher per-thread performance. And for lots of tasks the 100M Ethernet of the Beagleboard as an interconnect could become a bottleneck.
[1]http://ark.intel.com/products/64585/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...