The Epiphany processor is designed for the 65-nanometer manufacturing process, but the company hopes to jump to the 28-nm manufacturing process in the future, which will make the chip more power efficient, Olofsson said. A 1GHz chip made using the 28-nm process with 16 cores will consume 0.25 watts of power, according to the company.

The processor also differs from FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable circuits that can help execute specific tasks such as XML processing. The Epiphany chips are not restricted to running specific tasks, Olofsson said.