A method for communicating instructions to slave processors in a multi-processor system having a master processor and pipelined slave processors controlled by the master processor is described. The method uses a pass-through command having (i) a header block coded using a computer language understood by the slave processors and (ii) a payload block including instructions coded in a computer language understood by a destined slave processor. The pass-through command is transmitted to an outermost slave processor and then forwarded, without recoding, by intermediate downstream slave processors until the command reaches the destined slave processor. In one application, the method is used in a system adapted for processing video data or rendering graphics.