Today's hottest microprocessors for consumer PCs, Intel's Core Duo and AMD's Athlon 64 X2, combine two central processing units -- or "cores" -- on a single chip, where they can divide up tough jobs like encrypting data or processing high-definition video. Intel and AMD have begun to talk about "quad core" chips and even eight-core devices, which might be on the market by 2008. But in Redwood City, CA, there's a small company called Rapport that's already working on a 1,000-core chip.

Called the Kilocore1025 and expected to ship in mid-2007, the chip is designed to power handheld devices like game and media players. It includes an IBM Power PC CPU for general-purpose tasks but a whopping 1,024 additional "processing elements." Each element handles only eight bits of data at a time, in contrast to 32 or 64 bits for today's leading processors, and runs at the relatively low clock speed of 100 megahertz, far slower than the two to three gigahertz of today's notebook and desktop PCs. But that means the Kilocore chip consumes only one-tenth as much power as Intel's latest notebook PC chips.