If I read this correctly, this is effectively a better way to do thread level speculation (aka Speculative Multithreading), so in theory this could help in general purpose computing as well, just not 88x ;)
Your intuition on this improving Thread Level Speculation (TLS) is correct. I do want to clarify that this is not just a better implementation of TLS though -- our execution model is more expressive and avoids some of the pitfalls of TLS (see the Swarm paper http://bit.ly/swarmarch to learn more). Yes, you could use our implementation with a TLS-like execution model and improve on the TLS performance. But you are likely to reap more rewards by using the Fractal execution model + implementation.
