[kjs3]

Ya...IBM and CDC both had/have architectures that heavily distributed tasks to subprocessors of various sorts. Pretty much dates to the invention of large-scale computers.

You also have things like the IBM Cell processor from PS3 days: a PowerPC 'main' processor with 7 "Synergistic Processing Elements" that could be offloaded to. The SPEs were kinda like the current idea of 'big/small processors' a la ARM, except SPEs are way dumber and much harder to program.

Of course, specialized math, cryptographic and compression processors have been around forever. And you can even look at something like SCSI, where virtually all of the intelligence for working the drive was offloaded to the drive ccontroller.

Lots of ways the implement this idea.