A heterogeneous computing system described herein has an energy-efficient architecture that exploits producer-consumer locality, task parallelism and data parallelism. The heterogeneous computing system includes a task frontend that dispatches tasks and updated tasks from queues for execution based on properties associated with the queues, and execution units that include a first subset acting as producers to execute the tasks and generate the updated tasks, and a second subset acting as consumers to execute the updated tasks. The execution units includes one or more control processors to perform control operations, vector processors to perform vector operations, and accelerators to perform multimedia signal processing operations. The heterogeneous computing system also includes a memory backend containing the queues to store the tasks and the updated tasks for execution by the execution units.