3 ms·

It's sad to me that manually setting an IRQ is so horrible a prospect that it's better to compromise the entire system. Honestly, I don't understand why there

It's sad to me that manually setting an IRQ is so horrible a prospect that it's better to compromise the entire system. Honestly, I don't understand why there needs to be another CPU in the system. Do systems really need arbitrary bus protocol translation in real time? If people could agree to reasonable standards (a real possibility in the technological asymptote we have entered) we can eliminate this complexity entirely. Then we can worry about something else, which is secretly embedding mini-CPUs into the CPU itself.

akvadrako 9y ago
> Honestly, I don't understand why there needs to be another CPU in the system. There are tons of processors in modern systems. Most separate chips for controlling sub-systems have them, like DRAM, NICs, USB, keyboards, monitors, storage devices, video cards, etc... The reasons are performance and flexibility - when separate components act like remote hosts, the device manufacturer can divide up work between the OS driver (main CPU) and target system as desired.
- vthriller 9y ago
  To add to that: this is really nothing new, hard drives have had such chips for decades now, and even floppy disk drive for Commodore [0] was powered by its own 6502 CPU back in the 1980s. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541