Why use two processors on the BeBox?

With the BeBox, we showed that you can simply add another cheap processor and get a significant boost in performance and the ability to do more than one thing at a time. It's also a fundamentally better way to do real-time tasks since one processor can be dedicated to the real-time task and the other(s) can handle more general tasks.

Of course, having an operating system that threads between processors, and allowing applications to take advantage of this without having to have extensive understanding of the threading mechanism, helps a great deal.