Slimebeast said:
Wow I had no idea such a thing existed. I wouldn't have imagined you could have such an advantage with a specialized mini-chip (chip-within-a-chip or whatever it is). |
Usually it isn't economical to design and manufacture a custom processor for one specific application that you have. Because, sure, it'll be 10, 100 faster/smaller/more efficient than an off the shelf part, but the million dollars you need for R&D is too much.
It makes sense for embedded devices, phones and games consoles because they are high volume but using less power is crucial. So you see a lot of custom hardware for those segments.
The hardware also has its own special instruction set, you can't use the normal x86 commands to control it. So developers will need to target it specifically to use it. Therefore it doesn't need all the decoding hardware that a general processor needs. The I/O and memory access it needs is already on the CPU die anyway. And so on, until the actual specific block doesn't need to be that complex.
