"I don't think an average person is going to run out to buy a computer with Tilera in it," Strauss said. Intel has the advantage of being an incumbent, and even if Tilera offered something comparable to Intel's chips, it would take years to catch up.

But to start, Tilera is focusing the chips on specific applications that can scale in performance across a large number of cores. It has ported certain Linux applications commonly used in servers, like the Apache Web server, MySQL database and Memcached caching software, to the Tilera architecture.

"The reason we have target markets is not because of any technological limitations or other stuff in the chip. It is simply because, you know, you have to market your processor [to a] target audience. As a small company we can't boil the ocean," Agarwal said.

The company's strategy is to go after lucrative markets where parallel-processing capability has a quick payout, Strauss said. Tilera could expand beyond the Web space to other markets where low-power chips are needed.

It helps that applications can be programmed in C as with an Intel processor, but programmers are needed to write and port the applications, Strauss said. "How easy is it to port Windows or Linux also remains to be seen," he said.