You can program in floating point (I'm doing just that, with 6 cores performing Karatsuba-3 multiplication of 54-bit elements) but that is quite a bit slower than hardware DP multing (which Parallella boards lack too). FP multing will likewise be slower than hardware FP multing, which Parallella does have.
Sure, you can do floating point in software. My point is that dedicated hardware is very likely more power efficient at it. The same goes for memory: accesses to off-chip memory cost much more energy than accesses to on-chip memory. It would be very interesting to get energy and performance numbers for some real world application running on both chips.
You can program in floating point (I'm doing just that, with 6 cores performing Karatsuba-3 multiplication of 54-bit elements) but that is quite a bit slower than hardware DP multing (which Parallella boards lack too). FP multing will likewise be slower than hardware FP multing, which Parallella does have.