The present invention is a system on chip having a scalable, distributed processing architecture and memory capabilities through a plurality of parallel processing layers. In one embodiment, the processor comprises a plurality of processing layers, a processing layer controller, and a central direct memory access controller. The processing layer controller manages the scheduling of tasks and distribution of processing tasks to each processing layer. Within each processing layer, a plurality of pipelined processing units (Pus), specially designed for conducting a defined set of processing tasks, are in communication with program memories and data memories.