It really is a great addition; there have been a few SoCs that packed an ARM Cortex-M core or two alongside the big Application processor, and some FPGAs come w

It really is a great addition; there have been a few SoCs that packed an ARM Cortex-M core or two alongside the big Application processor, and some FPGAs come with small MCU sister cores. But gee, if I could produce BGA boards, I would be making one tomorrow with: - ARM Cortex-A SoC, preferably one with networking built-in to minimize layout hell like with the newer Raspberry Pis, but an ESP32 module could serve that purpose. - A nice ARM Cortex-M7 core @~200-400MHz, for realtime functionality and honestly, teaching. MCUs have huge potential for teaching about electronics/code with minimal overhead or required prior knowledge, imo. If your cheap laptop could also use successful educational tools like the Arduino IDE and Adafruit's libraries for things like sensors/I2C-SPI displays/etc out-of-the-box without requiring any boards or dongles...well, that would be absolutely terrific. - FPGA core with as many LUTs as I could get at a similar ~$20 price point of the Cortex-M, for ultra-realtime tasks like signal processing or video encoding. Then it would just be a fairly large software problem to make a nice GUI interface to program and debug the peripheral cores from a generic Linux/BSD environment. Unfortunately I can't even do QFN reliably, so a board like that would really limit my options with parts, and it would be huge with all the QFP-100+ parts. Also, the idea of juggling three large processing platforms' enormous documentation makes me shudder. But it would be a really cool idea for an open platform dedicated to handheld multimedia :/