[marcosscriven]

Always impressed with the PIO capabilities.

Reminds me of the old BeagleBone Black that had two small separate cores that worked in a similar way. Someone used it to create a 3D printer control system.

Are there any other chips out there like this?

[bri3d]

Application / realtime split cores are very common, STM32MP* was designed around the application processor / realtime processor split, I don’t remember if that’s what was on that Beaglebone. Any “big” application processor these days will have a variety of smaller generic cores (Cortex-M style) around it, some which usually handle programmable I/O.

A lot of microcontrollers also have pretty sophisticated interrupt controllers and timing analyzers which can be used to accomplish similar tasks, although they’re usually “programmed” by chaining register effects so it’s nowhere near as elegant as PIO.

Specialized IO coprocessors which are programmed using “code” like PIO is are a little less common, Infineon Peripheral Control Processor springs to mind.

[marcosscriven]

I just refreshed my memory - they were called Programmable Realtime Units on this chip: https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/microprocessors/1219716

Can the “little” cores in big.little arches be run entirely independently then? That’s pretty cool if so.

[15155]

> Specialized IO coprocessors which are programmed using “code” like PIO

Which is exactly what GP was talking about: the TI PRU cores are this.