 which circumstances. Deciding how the processors communicate with each other and how they share access to resources using some scheme of arbitration and conflict resolution. The list becomes elaborate. For now, we just want to give an idea of the task's magnitude. It should be rather obvious that this overall context creates an absolutely formidable computational "beast" that not many organizations really know how to formally tame-either from the hardware design side, or assuming they know how to logically partition the code for each processor (thereby allocating tasks at hand), from the mere challenge of tackling multiprocessor scheduling, coordinating execution and memory access, and even simply balancing the workload among the engines while respecting duplex multi-gigabit-per-second wire-speed I/O. This is where serious trade-offs will need to be considered by the systems architect and the true pros and cons of such a hyper-complex design become apparent. Tensilica has publicly shared its noble vision of the computational future of its trademarked con- cept of Sea of ProcessorsTM. This concept portrays an SOC world to come where hyper-sophisticated integrated design tools will automatically map a customer's application code onto a large series of optimally configured and embedded processor cores, which in unison with each other will be able to perform the tasks as desired and thereby satisfy a system's application requirements.6 Although spectacular progress has been accomplished in computer architectures as well as in soft- ware and integrated-circuit design tools and methodologies during the last two decades, we are not there yet. However, you should retain a clear sense of industry trend from this short overview. FLIX: CONFIGURABLE VLIW We will conclude our short discussion of Tensilica's configurable processor technology as an inter- esting means to develop a specialized high-performance, network-processing ASIC or SOC by men- tioning Tensilica's important recent introduction of the FLIX architecture, whi