In an endeavor to make its way into the server market, the San Jose, California-based two-year-old startup Tilera announced on Monday its new general-purpose processors equipped with a 100-core chip, Gx100.

The Tilera chip will be a notable potential threat to server market leaders Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), more so as the most recent chip from Intel, the Nehalem-EX chip, would be an x86 microprocessor with eight cores, while AMD's forthcoming Opteron chip is a 12-core chip!

Expected to hit the markets early next year, the CPUs packaged with Gx100 chips from Tilera would facilitate applications that necessitate computing punch as video conferencing, wireless base stations and networking.

Talking about the 100-core-chip processor, which would be fabricated using 40-nanometer technology, Tilera's Chief Technical Officer Anant Agarwal said: "This is a general purpose chip that can run off-the-shelf programs almost unmodified. And we can do that while offering at least four times the compute performance of an Intel Nehalem-Ex, while burning a third of the power as a Nehalem."

With features of a general-purpose CPU, the Gx100 would run the Linux OS and other applications that generally serve Web data. At its optimum performance level, the Gx100 will draw almost
55 watts of power; and can also serve as a co-processor alongside x86 chips, or even possibly substitute the chips in appliances and servers.