I'd much rather have seen an FPGA that could be addressed on the PCIe bus, as a standard feature. A decent one could be programmed to accelerate all sorts of things that the CPU may be too anemic to do to a modern par. I don't see how a PEAK of 1600MIPS (all four cores and all eight threads per keeping busy) is a big help, even to a 6000MIPS or so host processor. But if it's doing something significant to handle I/O, then maybe it's a good idea. Again, have to see just what they're doing with it.
I have the same opinion. A FPGA could be programmed to emulate AGA for compatibility and other nice stuff. They selected a 400MIPS chip, so based on speed, it is not a big help regarding processing power
If the idea is to use the XMOS to handle some kind of internal IO operations, it is a good one. But if they are aiming at using this chip to control some kind of user port, few people would take advantage of it. Probably, just geeky engineers like me
At some point, they stated that it could be used to emulate SID. I believe most of us would expect this chip to be capable of emulating the Amiga chipset, or doing something brand new. (I bet on the last one)
Anyway, the XMOS chip seems very nice, as a microcontroller. I could not resist to show that to the folks at work.
(PS: Oh my god, I'm talking to "the man". It's such an honor)
