sin and cos are often used to rotate vectors. In these cases, a trick with a CORDIC is to avoid the traditional sin/cos/multiply calculation by using the vector to be rotated as the input to the CORDIC. The CORDIC will directly produce the rotated vector, without having to compute sin/cos or do a complex multiplication.

CORDIC really shines when latency doesn't matter so much. You can pipeline every stage of the computation and get a huge throughput. It's well suited for digital mixing in radio systems.