In some embodiments, the invention involves reducing the time required for a platform to boot to its target application/operating-system using parallelization of firmware image content decompression and loading. An embodiment dispatches alternate processing agents as a means to intelligently assist in off-loading some of the initialization tasks so that the main processor may share the burden of boot tasks. In at least one embodiment, it is intended to build firmware images that facilitate parallelization, utilizing co-processing agents that can split these transactions across various processing agents. Other embodiments are described and claimed.