i cant find this listed anywhere, and i havent had one so i dont know.
i do know that they use an external controller, a rpi.
my question is if i compile cgminer, will they run off a laptop usb?
You need the little dongle also to convert from I2C (or SPI, I can't remember which they use), to Serial - but a PC can certainly communicate with them then. Avalon supplies tools to diagnose the boards that run on the PC, and I used them to check cores before.
Now, whether or not they latest driver code is part of the CGMiner tree, I don't know - but if you don't have an RPi, the easiest thing to do is probably just to compile it and see, if I remember correctly the dongle just enumerates like a normal USB serial port on Windows, so it's probably the same on Linux.
Hope that helps...