See Also: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10407818-264.html
Quote: Intel on Wednesday demonstrated a fully programmable 48-core processor it thinks will pave the way for massive data computers powerful enough to do more of what humans can.
Neural-network-like simulations, perhaps. Robotics?

I think these CPUs do have floating-point: In the PDF is a slide titled "SCC Demo Showcase" (p11) showing "Javascript Physics Modeling". I can't imagine them showing that off if the chip didn't have hardware FP capability.
Quote: Rattner said that SCC's 48 IA-32 [Intel Architecture, 32-bit] cores are simple, in-order designs and not sophisticated out-of-order processors.
So they are probably based on PII or P3 (or Atom?) architecture . But this is just an experimental chip designed to let potential users play with its many-core and inter-core communications capabilities and to suggest and try novel applications, rather than to have lots of raw processing power. That could be added later if the concept of the chip is viable.

Meanwhile, it looks like it is already a great thing for grid computing (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org). The parallel-processing software is there already, and Linux has had multi-CPU capability for up to 1024 processors for a while now. Go, MovieMan, Go !!