>These days, RAM hangs off the CPU -- and even "DMA" involves data passing through the CPU. Not for the microcontrollers I was talking about, it doesn't. They

>These days, RAM hangs off the CPU -- and even "DMA" involves data passing through the CPU. Not for the microcontrollers I was talking about, it doesn't. They have built-in bus arbiters to manage access to the internal RAM across the CPU and each DMA channel. Not every "CPU" is an application processor. But thank you for the history lesson! I guess the term "DMA" has become sort of generic these days.