In February IBM announced the PowerEN processor, which can be used as a general-purpose processor, or as a co-processor to which certain processes like network tasks can be off-loaded. The chip will be built into servers or offered as cards that can be plugged into a PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slot.

IBM is also putting an increased focus on FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are circuits that can help execute specific tasks faster than CPUs. The company already has FPGAs that do XML processing on servers.

Changes are needed at the software level to extract the best performance from the accompanying components, Menon said. IBM supports the OpenCL standard, a set of programming tools to develop and manage parallel task execution across CPUs and GPUs. The company is trying to make FPGAs flexible and easily reprogrammable through a new Java-compatible programming language called Lime, which is still being researched, Menon said.

"It's about trying to make FPGA programming just like normal programming so you can reconfigure the FPGA on the fly and redirect it to a new kind of application," he said.

Reprogrammable FPGAs could reduce the need for specialized chips -- also called ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) -- for specific tasks, Menon said. ASICs are not flexible and take time and money to build, Menon said.