The A9 does have respectable performance and great thermal characteristics. Rather than compete head to head with Intel, who are very very good a general purpose CPUs, it'd be interesting to see a cloud-optimized “server” which is actually a 1U cluster of storage processors – tweaked A9, as much flash as they can fit, etc. – so you'd have capacity to do things like encrypt everything at rest and in transit and apply distributed database techniques to everything because you'd have a relatively huge amount of processing capacity very close to each block of storage and they control the entire software stack.

Basically like what Oracle does with Exadata without fitting a yacht into the purchase price.