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So NDP is essentially what Commodore did with their 1541 disk drive. That disk drive had a 6502 in there to complement the 6502 in the actual VIC-20. From what
by CountHackulus 9y ago
So NDP is essentially what Commodore did with their 1541 disk drive. That disk drive had a 6502 in there to complement the 6502 in the actual VIC-20.
From what I remember, the IBM System Z mainframes also do this sort of thing and have dedicated IO processors that can decode XML on the fly for you and other fun things like that.
- jacquesm 9y agoEvery modern hard drive is a computer in its own right.
- sliken 8y agoSeagate had a cool project where each hard drive ran linux and they used the physical sas cable to run a 2.5 Gbit network (or two actually) per drive. So you could use that as block storage for luster, hadoop, or similar and enable things like direct disk to disk copies. Cool idea, seems unlikely to hit a reasonable price point though.
- michrassena 9y agoAs a matter of fact, I think this concept dates at least as far back as the IBM 360. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_I/O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_I/O And you can find similar concepts in a standard PC today. The GPU is an example of offloading a workload to a specialized processor.
- bshanks 8y agoIn addition, if each individual unit of memory hardware gained mini-CPU-like data processing capability, then you would have additional faux-CPU power that scaled linearly with memory; this would allow you to do some (embarassingly parallel) things much faster than just having one additional CPU per peripheral.