The Cell processor was an example of that. One MIPS CPU surrounded by 7 (8 on a good chip) simpler processors, with DMA between all units but not shared memory.  But the Cell only had 256 KB (not MB) of RAM local to each support processor.  That just wasn&#x27;t enough.<p>A Cell with a few megabytes of RAM in each support processor might be useful for bulk packet processing.  IBM built some blade servers like that. They were powerful, but too weird to sell in volume, and were discontinued in early 2012.<p>That&#x27;s the problem with exotic architectures.  It&#x27;s quite possible to build very high performance special purpose systems, but if the volume isn&#x27;t there, they can&#x27;t compete with commodity hardware.  Google, Facebook, or Amazon, who consume enough hardware to justify going custom, might do things in this direction.