Rapport's debut chip, available later this year, has 256 processing elements. (Courtesy of Rapport)

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.

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