COMPUTE ENGINE EMPLOYING A COPROCESSOR

A compute engine includes a central processing unit coupled to a coprocessor. The coprocessor includes a sequencer coupled to a set of application engines for performing operations assigned to the compute engine. The sequencer is coupled to application engines through a set of data, enable, and control interfaces. An arbiter couples the sequencer and application engines to memory. Alternatively, the coprocessor may include multiple sequencers, with each sequencer being coupled to a different set of application engines. One set of application engines includes a media access controller for communicating with a network and a data transfer engine coupling the media access controller to the arbiter. In one implementation, application engines facilitate different network services, including but not limited to: 1) virtual private networking; 2) secure sockets layer processing; 3) web caching; 4) hypertext mark-up language compression; 5) virus checking; 6) firewall support; and 7) web switching.