The processor is scalable to thousands of cores on a single chip, and can sit alongside CPUs to provide real-time execution of diverse applications, said Andreas Olofsson, CEO of Adapteva. Epiphany chips are currently scalable up to 64 cores in smartphones and up to 4,000 cores in servers.

Today's smartphone and PC chips come with CPUs for general-purpose processing, and specialized cores -- also called accelerators -- to perform specific functions such as video processing. Instead of being restricted to specific tasks, Adapteva aims to provide a flexible accelerator with multiple cores that can perform a number of functions.

The processor, based on a RISC (reduced instruction set computing) design, has floating point capabilities and is designed to be power efficient. A chip running at 1GHz with 16 cores can consume less than 1 watt of power, Olofsson said.

The processor can accelerate tasks like hand gesture recognition, face matching or face tracking, Olofsson said. Smartphones have limited capabilities for such tasks due to the limited processing power of the chips that fit their low-power profile. The Adapteva processors, however, are designed to execute such applications in a snap while consuming very little power.

The ability to run a number of C programs also separates the chip from graphics processing units (GPUs), which are increasingly being used in supercomputers to process math, science and graphics tasks, Olofsson said. Some GPUs rely on proprietary binary libraries from vendors, he noted.