A method of updating execution instructions of a multi-core processor comprising receiving execution instructions at a processor including multiple programmable processing cores integrated on a single die, selecting subset of at least one of the cores, and loading at least a portion of the execution instructions to the subset of cores and replacing existing execution instructions, associated with the first subset of programmable processing cores, with the received execution instructions while at least one of the other cores continues to process received packets, wherein a sequence of threads provided by the cores sequentially retrieve packets to process from at least one queue, the sequence proceeding from a subsequence of at least one thread of one core to a subsequence of at least one thread on another core and wherein the sequence of threads is specified by data identifying, at least, the next core in the sequence.