Re: DMA is obsolete

MitchAlsup1 wrote:

On Fri, 2 May 2025 2:15:24 +0000, Dan Cross wrote:

On the other hand, you buy a motherboard with said ASIC core,
and you can boot the MB without putting a big chip in the
socket--but you may have to deal with scant DRAM since the
big centralized chip contains teh memory controller.

>
A neat hack for bragging rights, but not terribly practical?
>
Anyway, it's a neat idea.  It's very reminiscent of IBM channel
controllers, in a way.

 It is more like the Peripheral Processors of CDC 6600 that run
ISA of a CDC 6600 without as much fancy execution in periphery.

Similar timeframe: The ND10 minis were popular in process control, CERN bought a brace of them.
When they later came out with the larger ND100 and then ND500 machines, the latter had a 100 (or 10?) as a front-end IO processor, partially required because the original ND10 came with a very early version of SINTRAN os which didn't have proper/complete IO support, so customers had written machine code to handle it.
The 500 wasn't machine code compatible, so all such IO routines then had to run on the front-end processor.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"