Some Systems Are Not Host-Centric

Unlike server and desktop computers, some processing applications do not lend themselves well to a host-centric topology. This includes cases where there are multiple levels of processing, complex look-up functions, protocol translation, etc. In these cases, a single processor (or even multiple CPUs on a host bus) can quickly become a bottleneck. Often what works more effectively is to assign control functions to a host processor and distribute data processing functions across multiple co-processors under its control. In some cases, pipeline (cascaded) co-processing is used to reduce latency.