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.

The 88x is the maximum speedup we get, yes. We believe our ideas are applicable to a wide range of domains ranging from databases, to discrete-event simulation, to machine learning, and graph analytics.

Very cool work nonetheless, it's easy for the software folks to feel completely hopeless these days with transistors suddenly getting more expensive per capita instead of cheaper.