This is basically the same principle as a GPU - specialized hardware that does one task really well. (In the GPU's case, it's lots of math, very quickly.) The

This is basically the same principle as a GPU - specialized hardware that does one task really well. (In the GPU's case, it's lots of math, very quickly.) The most common example I can think of is BCH coprocessing, which most modern application processors use for verifying data stored in embedded Flash.