COMPLETE SYSTEMS: We refer to our chips as Multi-Computer Systems because they are, in fact, complete systems. Supply one of our chips with power and a reset signal, and it is up and running. All of our chips can load their software at high speed using a single wire that can be daisy chained for multiple chips; if desired, most can be bootstrapped by a simple SPI flash memory. Application software can be manufactured into a custom chip for a modest cost to further simplify overall system design. External memory is not required to run application software, but our larger chips have sufficient I/O to directly control external memory devices if desired.
Contrast this with a Multi-Core CPU, which is not a computing system until other devices such as crystals, memory controllers, memories, and bus controllers have been added. All of these things consume energy, occupy space, cost money, add complexity, and create bottlenecks. Most multi-core CPUs are designed to speed up conventional operating systems, which typically have hundreds or thousands of concurrent processes, by letting a handful of process execute in parallel as opposed to only one. They are not, typically, designed for significantly parallel processing, and they are even less well suited for simple applications than are their less expensive single-core progenitors.
It's meant for hyper-parallel applications, unlike Pentium cores.
