AIOP is a fully programmable multicore engine with tightly coupled hardware accelerators that are specialized for efficient packet processing. It uses techniques somewhat similar to hardware multithreading to provide multiple "tasks" per core. The hardware supports efficient task switching to hide latencies associated with using accelerators and other hardware. The AIOP supports C language programming. It is optional in the DPAA2 architecture and thus, it is not available on all DPAA2 SoCs. Think of AIOP as an engine with network interfaces; therefore, it is an SoC network node. Command interfaces facilitate the control of AIOP software processing; this control is provided by software running on general purpose processing cores.