Given that ARM-chips have 128-bit NEON + AES-encryption at the core/chip level, you probably can push that bandwidth in a VPN-application without ever touching RAM.

Imagine a 1x100G WAN with encrypted traffic being routed to each of the 10g links based off of a simple application-specific decision. You can probably route that sort of thing without ever consulting main RAM at all.

Yeah, I'm liking this thing as a server-chip, but not so much a workstation. I think there's a lot of applications where a low-energy use CPU hanging off of high-speed fiber connections could be useful.

But I'm not entirely sure of any application that would benefit from the 16 cores, strangely enough.

The LX2160a has a 50Gbps crypto accelerator and a 100Gbps compression/decompression accelerator built into the network packet processor to help offload some of the processing. The 16-cores are useful for the high speed packet processing in userspace with DPDK.