Adapteva's Epiphany processors, however, can run standard ANSI-C applications "out of the box," Olofsson said. "We provide libraries to help programmers be productive but the programmer doesn't have to use our libraries."

"However, we do not have a memory management unit, so we can not act as a host for operating systems such as standard Linux or Windows," Olofsson said. 

The Epiphany processor is not designed to be a full-fledged CPU, and cannot execute programs with millions of lines of code, Olofsson said. A broad instruction set and large memory capabilities are needed to run such applications, which are available on full-fledged CPUs such as x86 processors.

Adapteva hopes to license its chip architecture to smartphone and tablet chip makers, and is also looking at supercomputers, in which the processors can be used to speed up execution of tasks such as weather modeling, logical simulations or medical applications. The company provides the development tools, including a compiler, debugger, run-time libraries and an integrated development environment.