The Propeller chip made by Parallax Inc. is a bit of a strange animal in the world of microcontrollers. This IC consists of eight 32-bit processor cores that are given access one by one to the peripherals and processor memory. This makes the Propeller extremely fast and it can work without the use of an interrupt mechanism: tasks that used to require an interrupt routine can now be run in their own processor core (called a 'COG' in Propeller-speak).