The frontend (bitstream) pipeline is still decoded by the host CPU.

However, a sufficiently fast host CPU can play Blu-ray without any hardware assistance whatsoever.

Because software mostly runs native at the speed of the host CPU, all timing loops will expire prematurely.

The drawback is that the guest OS has to be compatible with the host CPU.

This reduced the processing load on the host CPU and dramatically increased system throughput.

This allows speech applications to scale to large numbers of concurrent calls, without bogging down the host CPU.

It is also important for the audio engineer to realise the amount of processing power required by the host CPU to manipulate the audio.

The main disadvantage of interpreting is a much slower speed of program execution compared to direct machine code execution on the host CPU.

The CA20K1 chip is a slave processor which requires a host CPU to control it.

This can be contrasted with a compiled language which is converted into machine code and then 'directly' executed by the host CPU.