A Silly Question regarding a coprocessor


Batou456

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While investigating various things I came across this in regards to the AmigaOne X1000's use of a XMOS XCore:


"Capable of eight concurrent real-time threads with shared memory space, at up to 400 MIPS (about 6 68060s worth), Xena gives the X1000 a very flexible, very expandable co-processor," A-eon writes, "The uses are endless; control hardware, DSP functions, robotics, display - even SID chip and console emulators."


And so out of curiosity I looked it up and found it was low power (15-200mW)) and not excessively expensive in of itself (<10USD @65nm TSMC process).


I have no experience with a XMOS platform, but the company brochure emphasizes it's a C programmable "event driven processor." Hence any of the eight threads it manages at a time can be stopped and restarted when appropriate with event triggers.


That leaves the obvious question though of whether there are actually any systems whose emulation would really benefit from such a thing, and thus whether it would be worth integrating into the eventual Pandora Mk. 2? The likely time frame of which, due to process shrinks, is liable to involve a 500MIPS per core, quad core being the baseline instead of the over 20USD option.
 
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